Landau: Vorwort

1. Get More Stable Discs, Not Just More Discs

The object of Othello is to end the game with more discs than your opponent. This ultimate goal is frequently translated, by many beginning players, into an immediate goal throughout the game. That is, on each turn, a player will (with few exceptions) take the move that flips the maximum number of discs. This has been clearly shown to be an inferior strategy. Actually, disc count is often irrelevant to who is ahead in a game. This point can not be stated too strongly. In fact, players who consistently flip large numbers of discs early in the game are among the easiest opponents for experts to defeat! An example is in Diagram 2. Here, Black has only one disc on the board, with only four moves left in the game. But if you play the game out, you will find that Black gets all the remaining moves and wins the game 40-24. Clearly, simply having a lot of discs, even at such a late point in the game, is not enough to assure victory. Even games between experts may end with this sort of tum-around in the last few moves (though usually not as dramatic as in this example). The reason this can happen is that White's disc majority was fragile, since many of his discs were vulnerable to being flipped by Black. The point therefore is not simply to acquire discs, but acquire discs that cannot be flipped for the rest of the game, no matter how the game develops. Such discs are called stable discs. Unfortunately, as we will see, stable discs usually cannot be acquired in any great number until the endgame. Therefore, the strategy for the majority of the game focuses on factors other than the relative disc counts of the two players. These are discussed in the next several points.