Having played extensively at the top tables for the last couple of months, I have noticed certain trends that I find alternately amusing and aggravating.

As I've grown familiar with the game and the top players, I have come to realize that, much like life, relationships between kdice players are not simple black and white dileanations; they cannot be divided into simple groups and teams. Rather, the interaction between players is a complex structure like that of a web or a tapestry, with different connections between every player, and the tangled skein can lead to some interesting results.

One of the most amusing things I see (and it happens fairly often) is watching two players who dislike each other have to defend themselves against a PGA accusation from a third party.

Here's a piece of advice:

It's not a PGA, it's a personality type.

What do I mean? Well, the answer to the question is a bit complicated, but if you bear with me I will start to make sense (I hope).

Success at kdice is heavily steeped in an understanding of game theory, whether it's something that you've specifically studied or just "intuited" over the years. I want to quote one specific sentence from a wikipedia article on a subset of game theory:

"As in all game theory, the only concern of each individual player is maximizing his/her own payoff, without any concern for the other player's payoff."

(You may be thinking "Wait, I cooperate with people for favors later." I'll get to that.)

Let us pretend for the moment that there was no chatbox in kdice, and no way to even see who it was you were playing against. It would be impossible to communicate with other players, and given equal levels of skill, you would win 1/7th of your games.

Let's pretend further, for a moment, that instead of 13 starting dice you were given 20 (or four five-stack territories) while everyone else still had 13. How many games would you win? Yeah, a lot.

Now, let's forget about you having additional dice, and go back to our simpler version of kdice, but add in the chatbox, giving you the ability to work with other players. In this theoretical version, while you can talk to players, you can't figure out who they are from game to game.

Given that everyone has equal starting resources, working together with another player applies twice as many resources (and turns!) to the team. Although the reward has to be divided in half, you as a team would win far more than twice as many games with the additional resources that you bring to bear, so your point reward for any given game would go up significantly by cooperating between players.

Therefore, it would make sense under this system for players who want to maximize their points to truce. Ignore what you think is or is not "lame", we're talking strictly about mathematical advantage here.

So, given that trucing in kdice is a winning strategy, it is natural that the players who wind up at the top have a tendency to truce.

Now, let's add back in knowing who other players are, and bring ourselves to the current version of kdice. It's possible not only to chat with and truce with other players, the community (especially near the top) is small enough that the same players see each other again and again.

That turns the decision making process in kdice into a sort of never-ending *iterated prisoner's dilemna*. The full article is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_iterated_prisoner.27s_dilemma , but I will sum up simply:

Pretend you're playing rock, paper, scissors. If you play against someone once and only one, it's pretty much a crap shoot. But now imagine that you played the same player hundreds of times. You might notice that they have a tendency to choose rock, so you might start picking paper a lot. Then she might notice you're picking paper, and she'd switch to scissors. It goes on and on, and after enough iterations you might have a complex strategy indeed of figuring out what your opponent was going to do. Different algorithms have been created that can actually pretty effectively school real players in RPS and other, similar, games.

The same thing happens in kdice with players you see again and again. You being to have certain expectations about what might happen if you're in a game with certain players, and it affects your decision making process. To illustrate my point, I will give you an example based on two specific players I see plenty of: montecarlo and MadHat_Sam.

Monte is a trucer. He truces early and often, and is reliable when he truces. He tends to play conservatively but heartlessly. My experience with him has always been that he can be relied on as a teammate. When I play games with monte I tend to be pretty vocal and will often truce with him. I also make aggressive plays on the board against other players when he is my neighbor, because he has a tendency not to stick his neck out, especially over the middle of the board.

Sam is also a trucer, although he has a tendency to truce later on in games. He plays very aggressively at times, and doesn't finish in the middle of the pack very much. Sam and I got off to a bad start when I came to the 1k tables, and we have a tendency to fight each other, although with both of us it is mitigated by a preference to win rather than exact revenge, so we do sometimes truce, although it is not as frequent for either of us as it is with other players.

I could go on and on. lastmurti is unpredictable, nexon is retaliatory, etc.

So where am I going with this?

I freely admit to being a big time trucer. It's a winning, proven strategy. And I will truce with anyone. When I make the decision to truce, it's based on a lot of factors, and as the game is on a clock it's often a split second decision. When you're making fast decisions, you tend to rely on a lot of subconscious variables.

Let's take a couple of hypothetical scenarios. Remember, I am making the decision to maximize my given points in a situation.

Scenario 1:

I have two neighbors, montecarlo who is weak and an unknown player who is strong, but not overwhelmingly strong. I will likely attack montecarlo.

Scenario 2:

I have two neighbors, montecarlo who is weak and an unknown player who is weak. I will likely attack the unknown player. Why? Because I've run 300 iterations of the prisoner's diliemma with monte, and I know that he is a player who rewards cooperation. It's not that I dislike the unknown player, or that I like monte in particular.

There are a million variations, but when you add them all up, I am *more likely* to truce with players I know. What does this lead to? Well, I'm hardly the only one who is making these kinds of decisions, *Every* player makes these decisions. A simple way of saying this is "I know who I can trust, and who I can't."

Essentially, the player who truces, and who makes a habit of studying other players to know who to trust and who not to trust, will trend towards the elite section of the game. This behavior tends to reinforce itself, as with lots of trucing going on, *not* trucing becomes an even worse technique, and tends to hurt people.

So, what does this mean to "aspiring" 10k players?

A few important things...

First, trucing is a fact of life at 10k. Get used to it, and get good at it.

Second, you probably didn't get PGAed. What FAR more likely happened was that, when it got down to 4 or 5 players, it was a bunch of people who knew each other, and you. Those players don't dislike you, and they didn't arrange anything in advance. Instead they are making decisions designed to maximize their return on the game, and you are an unknown variable to them.

So how do you overcome this?

First, don't get discouraged. It's NOT an old boys club, it's a bunch of individual players making decisions that tend to hurt unknown players on the board. What you need to do is keep coming back, and make yourself known.

I know that my personal experience at 1k was that I got my butt kicked when I first got there. But eventually as I got some good starts and truced with people from a position of advantage, people began to recognize me and remember that it was safe to team with me, and I've never looked back.

Second, you *HAVE* to chat, talk, and negotiate. If people don't know you, they are not likely to reach out to you. I can't count the number of times I've watched a board conversation play out, and the new guy who didn't say anything suddenly screams PGA when he gets attacked after it all got spelled out on the board.

Really anyone who wants to can succed at 10k by learning to negotiate, and by always honoring your truces.