<Thad -

Once again, you have brought up interesting points of discussion and comparison, which is what we want. You have compared Pente/Keryo Pente to professional-level tennis and volleyball. This is an interesting comparison and is certainly reasonably valid.

Your statement:
>> I can site an example where player 1 has a strong advantage over player 2, yet this game is played at the professional level...tennis.
volleyball (also played professionally) is another example where one player (well, team in this case) has an advantage over the other, in this case, it is team 2 who has the advantage!

My response:
I will only do the comparison to tennis. I think you'll see why once you read this.

You are absolutely correct that the person serving in tennis has a large advantage at the prosessional ranks. I have never quite understood why they don't just play EVERY game in a set and match like they do in tiebreaker games when a set is tied 6-6. For everyone's information, in a tiebreaker tennis game, the result of the game is NOT influenced by who serves the first point, because after ONE point, the serve is switched and each player serves 2 points in a row before switching again and it continues switching like that until someone has won 7 points AND leads by 2 points. It is designed that way so that NEITHER player has EVER served more than ONE more point then his opponent in the game.

But that is NOT how they choose to do it, so I will address HOW they choose to do it. Although I can't quote any specific statistics, I can say that it is a REASONABLE estimate that the server at the highest ranks (top 10-15) in men's play probably wins about 75-80% of games. In my opinion that is TOO large and the rules should be changed a bit, but at the same time, I can say that it is OK because a set is not won until someone has won 6 or 7 games (or more in the case of final set matches in some tournaments where someone must win the final set by 2 games) and a MATCH is not won until 2 or 3 sets have been won.

Now contrast one side winning 75-80% of the time in individual games WITHIN sets WITHIN a SINGLE match to the advantage enjoyed by player 1 in Fun-pente. To give you an idea of how much larger the advantage is in one side for FunPente vs. tennis, we have to compare apples to apples. So since we're talking the top 10-15 players in men's tennis, we must take the top 10-15 Pente players in the world. This list would probably include the following in no specific order:
Russians:
1. Victor Barykin
2. Dmitri Krasnonosov
3. Igor Sinyov
4. Alexander Nosovsky
Americans:
1. Scott Justice
2. Tom Braunlich
3. Rollie Tesch
4. Bodo Koonz
5. Myself
6. Dmitri King
Others:
1. Istvan Virag of Hungary
2. Don Banks of Canada

There are MANY other noteables, but the above would be the ones that I can think of that would encompass the 'professional level' ranks of Pente if there were any money in the game.

Now if you took ALL of those players and put them together in a single Pente tournament WITHOUT any opening restriction, I would estimate that player 1 would win 98% of the time in the first tournament, 99.5% of the time in the second tournament, and 100% of the time after that!! I would even go so far as to say that the ONLY reason that ANY games would be lost as player 2 is because the players became so bored with the overwhelming advantage enjoyed by player 1 that they overlooked an obvious attack by the 2nd player. If you doubt this, just ask any one of those players and they will tell you the same thing.

Now consider one FURTHER thing. There is currently NO MONEY in Pente!! So there is NO incentive to better one's self other than the enjoyment of the game itself. So there are FAR fewer players then there COULD be in Pente because there is NO money in it!

Now imagine if the ALL OF A SUDDEN, there were REGULAR HUGE-money Pente tournaments like there are in tennis where the winner wins $500K+!!! Would you NOT doubt that there would ALL OF A SUDDEN be a HUGE # of top-level Chess, GoMoku, Renju, you-name-it game players that would start playing and studying Pente?

If something like that happened and continued consistently every year, there would quickly be 300-500 players that are as good as the top 10-15 are now. NOW, take the TOP 10 out of THOSE 300-500 players! At that point, even WITH the CURRENT restriction, player 1 would probably push past 95%+ within 1-2 years. WITHOUT it, player 1 would NEVER lose!

Does everyone understand the magnitude of the advantage that we are talking about here? We're not just talking a paltry advantage where player 1 wins 75-80% of the time amongst top players. What we're talking about is a FORCED win for player 1 just like has been proven in 24 moves in GoMoku! I will go on record as stating that player 1 wins by force in Pente without restriction in 22 or less moves! (Possibly as little as 19-20)

But also, does everyone understand that when we said that the game can be BIG, we mean REALLY big!! I LOVE this game and I want it to be HUGE!! Bigger than Chess, bigger than Renju, heck bigger than tennis!! Just IMAGINE it!! The local papers advertising local Pente clubs and every 100K+ population metropolitan area having a big tournament at least once/month. That's how big we are thinking!

But like I said, in order to be that big, MANY top players must be interested in the game so that their passion can drive the game by creating strategy guides, opening books, end-game books, game databases, teaching software, and on and on.

If all of you could only read Tom Branlich's 1984 book 'Pente Strategy' you would SEE the passion in that man's writing about how GREAT the game really is and how BIG that it can become! Tom is a former 3-time world pente champion who was already a master in Chess before taking up Pente. Now image if there were 25-50 players JUST LIKE HIM!! The publications would be NUMEROUS and the interest would be HUGE! But I can promise that master-level players at ANY games will NOT write strategy guides if there is no further way to improve one's self because one side has too large of an advantage. And if we allow beginning players to CONTINUE to be confused as to what the correct rules are, then that will only FURTHER be detrimental to the game.


Gary Barnes