Prompted by my teams recent sub-par performance in this years Lustrian Challenge I was tempted very much to blame it on the dice and use bad luck as an excuse. However, after a closer examination I realized all those situations where either my opponent had gotten lucky or I had suffered from bad luck had been set up by bad decisions. I realized both that bad luck can be prepared for, and that I was bad at it. As the result of this unflattering introspection I've decided to write something down in case it might help someone else too.

So, if you go to the forums and ask how you can prepare for bad luck, most likely asnwer is to just keep a cool head. This is both correct, and mostly useless advice. Remaining calm is only the starting point for making good logical decisions, and if you focus only on that you are going to get timed out after doing mind-calming exercises for 4 minutes. A typical knee-jerk reaction is giving up mentally and instead just blitzing with your biggest hitter because you "need amazing cas to win". Instead, I think there are a few key points to focus on, which are assessing, preventing and having multi-layered plans.

The first one means assessing which side would be stronger in a "fair" situation with average dice rolls. If it is you, the plan needs to be making the turns as little reliant on luck as possible and just ride out the bad streak. On the other hand, if you are the underdog waiting it out is probably a bad idea. I would call this skill being able to spot which turns are crucial and which are not, and its probably one thing that makes the difference between superstars and legends. One great example of this is PeteW, who is often cheerfully maligned as a lucky coach, because he knows very well when to act.

The second part is much easier for a pessimist like me. It just means planning every move with the thought "if this fails and is a turnover, how bad will it be". You cannot prevent quad skulls, but you can usually plan so it won't leave your ballcarrier exposed or otherwise lose the game. Same thing goes for your opponents sudden bursts of good fortune. There is a difference between a wardancer leaping into your cage and -2d doublepowing (or stripballing) your ballcarrier, and your opponent doing that and retrieving the ball into a safe spot. The first is really hard to prevent, but only the second one means losing and usually it can be made a lot more difficult. Of course the ultimate skill in prevention is when your opponent does not even try because it would be too hard, but that depends on how well they have assessed the situation.

The last part is related to both earlier ones. There is a difference between plans that rely on making (or failing) few rolls, and ones that have multiple layers so to speak. Generally speaking the more different rolls your opponent has to make in order to break your defence, the more layers that defence has. For example the difference is your opponent rolling a 6 to pass and some high number to catch like 4+, which can still happen quite feasibly. Compare that with him/her making several dodges through tacklezones, some tentacle rolls and both pass and catch happen in range of several disturbing presences. The more crucial (ones they cannot fail) rolls your opponent has to make, the better your defence is. And its even better if they are different kinds of rolls like having some strength-based tentacles rolls mixed in, because special players like ag5 leapers (which every elf team has) can make a mockery of even the best defences which rely only on failing dodges. So in a sense a composite defence is preferable to one-dimensional one.

Thats it for my rant for now, good thing there is still the Fumbbl Cup coming soon, so Uusiverikulho have one final major to make an appearance in this year :)