Tag: playing the game

Finite and infinite cricket games

I’ve written about James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games here before. It is among the more influential books I’ve read, though it’s a bit of a weirdly written book, almost in a constant staccato tone.

From one of my previous posts:

One of the most influential books I’ve read is James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. Finite Games are artificial games where we play to “win”. There is a defined finish, and there is a set of tasks that we need to achieve that constitutes “victory”. Most real-life games are on the other hand are “infinite games” where the objective is to simply ensure that the game simply goes on.

I’ve spent most of this evening watching The Test, the Amazon Prime documentary about the Australian cricket team after Sandpapergate. It’s a good half-watch. Parts of it demand a lot of attention, but overall it’s a nice “background watch” while I’m doing something else.

In any case, the reason for writing the post is this little interview of Harsha Bhogle somewhere in the middle of this documentary (he has appeared several times more after this one). In this bit, he talks about how in Test cricket, the opponent might be having a good time for a while, but it is okay to permit him that. To paraphrase Gully Boy, “apna time aayega” – the bowler or batsman in question will tire or diminish after some time, after which you can do your business.

He went on to say that this is not the case in limited overs cricket (ODIs and T20s) where both batsmen and bowlers need to constantly look to dominate, and cannot simply look to “survive” when an opponent is on the roll.

While Test cricket is strictly not an “infinite game” (it needs to end in five days), I thought this was a beautiful illustration of the concept of finite and infinite games. The objective of an infinite game, as James Carse describes in his book, is to just continue to play the game.

As a batsman in Test cricket, you look to just be there, weather out the good spells and spend time at the crease. You do this and the runs will come (it is analogous for bowlers – you need to bowl well enough to continue to be in the game, and then when the time comes you will get your rewards).

In ODIs and T20s, you cannot bide your time. Irrespective of how the opponent is playing, you need to “win every moment”, which is the premise for a finite game.

Now, I don’t know what I’m getting at here, and what he point of this post is, but I think I just liked Harsha Bhogle’s characterisation of Tests as infinite games, and wanted to share that with you.

Chowka Baarah

Yesterday after a gap of about fifteen years, I played chowka-baarah. For starters, the name intrigues me. It translates into four-twelve (I suppose), but that doesn’t make sense. Essentially, there are two primary variations of this game depending upon the size of the grid used (5 by 5 or 7 by 7), and these two numbers are “big numbers” in different systems. In the 5×5 version, the “big scores” are 4 and 8, while in the “7×7” system, it’s 6 and 12.

A certain variety of seashells (called kavaDe in Kannada) are used as dice, four of them in the 5×5 version and 6 in the larger version. The “score” of the dice is determined by the number of kavaDes falling “face up”, and if all fall face down, the score is twice the number of dice. So if you have 4 shells and all fall face down, you get 8 points. I haven’t done much research on this but I do think the probability of a die falling “face up” is much more than the probability of it falling “face down”. I don’t know the exact probability.

The game itself is like Ludo; your pawns going round and round in circles and inward in order to reach the centre of the square when it “queens”. The first player to queen all their pawns wins. There are concepts such as doubling pawns (they act as a pair hten, move in pairs only on even throws of the die, etc.), cutting (if your pawn reaches a square where an opponent’s pawn is, the opponent’s pawn “goes home”, etc. Simple game, and widely played in a lot of “traditional households”.

Considering that I had stopped playing this game when I was still quite small, i had never realized the strategies involved in playing the game. Back then I’d just generally move whatever pawn i fancied nad somehow my grandparents would move in a way in order to simply enable me to win. It was only yesterday that I realized that the game is not as simple as I thought, and that strategy dominates luck when determining how you do.

It’s not like bridge, where card distributions are exchanged across pairs in order to take the luck out of the game. Nevertheless, I realize that the number of “turns” in the game is large enough for the probabilities in the seashells to balance out across players. Rather, the decision that you need to make at each turn regarding which pawn to move is so important that the importance of this drawfs the number you threw! Again you will need to keep into account stuff like the distribution of your next throw, your opponent’s next throw and so on.

I think I have a thing for games with randomness built into them rahter than those that are completely a function of the players’ moves (like chess). I think this is because even with the same set of players, games with randomness built in lead to a larger variety of positions which makes the game more exciting.

Coming back to Chowka Baarah, the other thing I was thinking of last night was if sunk cost fallacy applied in this, when I was trying to decide betwen a reasonably advanced pawn and a backward pawn to decide as to which one to save. Finally I decided that apart from the loss in terms of the pawn being sent home, other things that I had to take into consideration when I moved was about which pawn capture would be more valuable for the opponent, probabilities of differnet pawns getting captured, potential danger to other pawns, etc.

It’s a fun game, one of the most fun “traditional” games. Maybe one of the most “strategic” traditional games. Miss playing it for the last fifteen years or so.