Marshall Sutherland

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 16:40:26 -0400

dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com

My week 3 #skeeball match tomorrow night starts at 7pm US Eastern Time (score.brewskeeball.com). I think I'm going to slightly tweak my strategy from last week. Last week's strategy was to roll for hundos until I missed two total (not counting ricochets into 3, 4 or 5). The slight teak is that now I will go until I miss 2 in a row (again, excluding ricochets into 3, 4 or 5). That gives me some more up-side potential, while still limiting my down-side risk.

skeeball

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Tue, 24 Oct 2023 08:10:58 -0400

Marshall Sutherland

dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com

This week, we won 712-676... against 2 players. I had my worst game of the season (but barely over average for past seasons) with a score of 259. Opal was back this week and was our high scorer with 268. Then she rolled a 287 in a make-up game for last week, making her the high roller for that game, too. I still have the highest average on the team for the season.

My change in hundo strategy did not pay off this week. I had only 4 for the entire game. I'm thinking of chucking it in favor of something completely different. It doesn't really matter if you have two frames of 10 and 50 or two frames of 30 each. So, rather than rolling for a few hundos in each frame, which often results in a couple wild rolls before giving up and then having some bad initial rolls up the middle, maybe I should roll whole frames of one or the other. Another option is to roll for hundos 4 or 5 times in some frames and then decide to either continue or not. Most hundo-rollers roll for hundos all the time except when trying to make sure they get a chip (37+) or fish (46+) and expect to have good and bad frames that will average out in their favor. The last (only?) time I tried that, it was my worst night ever. Maybe going with my idea above, I should start with hundo frames and, if it just isn't working on that lane that night, give up on them for the rest of the match.

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 19:15:33 -0400

Marshall Sutherland

dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com

I know I post way to much about my strategy musings, but having to explain them helps me think about my options.

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 19:58:05 -0400 last edited: Tue, 24 Oct 2023 20:05:47 -0400

Jason Cook

jason@hub.inktada.com

I found the two miss version interesting.

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 20:30:21 -0400

Marshall Sutherland

dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com

It is basically a risk/reward trade-off problem, but with unknown variables. If everything was always the same, in theory, I could figure out what my expected return is for aiming at every pocket and always roll for the pocket with the highest expected return. But, everything isn't the same. The pockets in different lanes have different degrees of "bounciness". Pockets wear and get bigger. They get replaced and return to their original shape, but may get bouncier. So, every week, these unknown variables change, which means the expected return for rolling for any given pocket is different than it was the week before.

Recognizing what is working and what isn't seems like the best approach, but actually doing that in the middle of a game (especially when you happen to be the team scorekeeper) is tough. All these crazy schemes of mine are attempts to give myself a system of rules to follow that will tell me how to adjust, because following a rule is easier than trying to adjust on the fly. The change from the previous week to this week was because after rolling 1, 10, 1, I thought "I really wish I could try for 10 one more time". At some point last night, I started thinking "maybe I should stop wasting two rolls/frame on hundos", but I kept following my rule.

Maybe instead of inventing new schemes, I should just get better at adjusting on the fly. But, I can only work on that when I'm at the lanes, so my mind works on schemes the rest of the week, LOL.