Low-rank Checkers
When I have a block of time too small to be put to good use—say four or five minutes while waiting for water to boil, or for Eileene to find her keys—I keep myself occupied with a quick round of the internet checkers program that comes with Windows. It’s happened often enough that I took the trouble of leafing through a book on checkers at the MSU library. There wasn’t much to it; checkers is not nearly so deep a game as chess, nor even as deep as reversi. It did explain something that had been troubling me, however.
The book took a page to describe and deflate a checkers myth. The idea is that, if you never move your checkers off your back rank, you can never lose. Your opponent can never get a king, nor can he capture those last four checkers. This is, technically, true, but it’s as useful as pointing out that, if you never inhale, you’ll never drown. Sooner or later, you need to breathe. And, unless your opponent is actively helping you win, you’ll sooner or later need to move one of those checkers off the back rank, if only because he’s captured the rest of your pieces. In the meantime, you’re playing with two thirds of your strength, and thus with a terrible handicap.
Lingering on the back rank before committing to a new position can serve important purposes, but determining never to move off the back rank under any circumstances whatsoever is laughable. Yet the idea refuses to die out, smoldering among the patzer community like a California brush fire. So strongly do a few of the online players subscribe to the strategy that, left with the choice of moving off the back rank or losing two or three pieces immediately, will choose to lose the pieces. Typically, this doesn’t even buy time; the pieces are captured, and the patzers still have to move off the back rank on their next turn. The idea still boggles my mind, but at least now I know where the motive for throwing pieces away comes from.
Distrust simple, guaranteed-to-win strategies. If they really worked, nobody would play the game much longer, any more than people play tic-tac-toe past the age of 8 or so.