I fully believe there are times when different experience levels can make a massive difference in the outcome.

I like the MtG references where you may be playing against an unknown but not have a clue how your opponent would react to certain things. Are they holding a counterspell just waiting to kill your game ender? Are they holding buffs to punish you for blocking and inversely how do they respond if you throw a bluff their way? It pays to know how your opponent plays.

I'm not certain how often the novice move can mess with a master's game in Chess but the master can certainly screw with a novice. Everyone knows the queen is the most valuable piece on a side so when one slides it up to sit diagonally in front of an enemy pawn you should know something big is up. Maybe it's a novice mistake that puts such an important piece into harms way but against anyone with experience that queen probably needs to be left alone. Of course my opponent nicely took the bait which moved the pawn out of blocking contention as a bishop slipped in front of the pawn and mated the opponent is a true fool's mate scenario.

In minis I've had an opponent stress so much over positioning a piece that has just telegraphing his plan. Of course he happened to miss a little extra movement potential on my side which caused his carefully constructed plan to completely fall apart.

I think it mostly comes down to planning vs flexibility. If you create ornately detailed game plans but then can't react when your opponent does something you weren't expecting, you will lose some number of games against lower-level players and their unorthodox plays.

If you are good at reacting on-the-fly to things but don't have an overall vision for how you want the game to play out, then you will lose some number of games to mid-level players because of a bad match-up or maybe bad luck.

And both types of players will lose games to the Master player, who can identify the rigid planner's strategy and counter it, leaving them helpless, and who can use long term planning against a purely reactive player to engineer a game to favor them despite the match-up or dice results. I suppose this means a master player is one that can play the long game just as well as the short game.

This reminds me of something I once heard second hand from a friend. A black belt commented that she preferred to fight newer students over other black belts because she never knew what they were going to do next. Made things more interesting.

This is why I like to play a conservative opening, often delaying with 1 forwards, turns, k turns, self blocking for a couple of turns, delaying combat to round 3 or 4 against a player I don't know.

Learning about your opponent is useful. Even if it's leaked information. If they rush on turn 1, they show strong lines of attack, and obstacles do a lot to limit potential moves. If they approach slowly and do so twice in a row,or if they then rush or if they delay as well, you can learn something.

While you must be careful to mind the options they have, as they approach. You're also revealing care to them, but that's ok - what you really want is to see where and what they will attack. Especially if you're set in multiple groups. But at the least it lets you make some guesses as to your opponents level.

This reminds me of something I once heard second hand from a friend. A black belt commented that she preferred to fight newer students over other black belts because she never knew what they were going to do next. Made things more interesting.

Interesting quote, but I don't think it applies so much in X-Wing. Becoming a black belt in most formal martial arts isn't done by winning competitions and actually defeating other fighters, it's done by memorizing hundreds of different forms and techniques in a particular martial art and being able to perform them in sequence under controlled conditions to one, sometimes a few, person's subjective approval.

So it would make sense that a black belt would get bored fighting other black belts, since they are both just competing to see who can execute moves that the other already knows and has likely practiced a counter to every move they know a thousand times. It can easily become 2 people mindlessly testing who has the better muscle memory. A lower belt on the other hand has less rote technique to rely on and will be more likely to resort to improvisation, which will be more mentally challenging to a black belt, since they may not have practiced a thousand times to counter a move they've never seen before, even if that move isn't all that effective.

X-Wing is different, because while there are practiced moves that you can learn in the game, improvisation is necessary at every level of the game, and the better players, the "black belts" of the game, are ones that have practiced their technique so they can perform their openings in their sleep, but can also improvise masterfully to catch rigid opponents off-guard.

But that is definitely a great quote that provides a lot of food for thought.

I integrate "pattern interrupts" into my gameplan when facing skilled opponents for pretty much this reason. I'll make a move that is intentionally optimal but completely defies and destroys all of their multi-turn planning and forces them to start over. I have to be careful with this to make sure I am not putting myself at a disadvantage. A good example is when I am flying very well and presenting myself as a skilled opponent through my choices and actions (never through bragging, it undermines the pattern interrupt later on). By doing this, I can mentally establish myself to my opponent as a higher level player and they put their A-game on and really start to plan ahead, usually on round 3 or 4 just after opening fire went less favorably for him than he had hoped. With this thought he in his head, he's now expecting smart moves, bluffs and double bluffs, double guesses, arc dodging. He's expecting it all. So, perhaps, instead of doing the best thing and simply arc dodging or pulling away for safer shots, I drop a 4 forward like a total noob and charge in there guns blazing.

This honestly works pretty much every time I manage to pull off the whole gambit. Such a brash and unsafe move is totally unexpected. After all, he knows that, perhaps in that spot, he had a lot of options to block or threaten that spot so there's no way a skilled player would risk it. So when I make a move that a skilled player might not make, I wind up in an advantageous position.

Now the key here isn't to actually have a positional advantage, but to interrupt their mental battle plan and expectations. It creates self doubt and will force them to question your moves much more. Are you good, or lucky? That self doubt really goes a long way towards making mistakes. This is part of winning the game above the table. A pattern interrupt completely shatters an opponents focus.

Imagine it like this. A person you are meeting for the first time reaches out to shake your hand after introducing himself. As soon as you reach out to shake his hand in return, he suddenly bends over and ties his shoe instead, as if that had always been his intent. How does that make you feel? Analyze that feeling, because when you defy your opponents expectations, that's how you make them feel, and it's a powerful tool. Once you have interrupted the pattern, you are in control, and better, you have gotten one step further inside their head.

Remember, the goal is NEVER to be rude or berating to your opponent. Be very careful with your words. You want to get in your opponents head and stress them out without them thinking that you're doing anything unsavory. If you get rude or start probing, they will get focused on how uncomfortable they are with YOU, which may seem like a good thing to some people, but that just makes them question YOUR judgement and their own, meaning they are more likely to start calling TO's over and generally question everything you do. Not saying that your cheating, but by suddenly having to explain and justify everything because they question your judgement means you have to reveal more than you really want too and creates an unpleasant atmosphere that's difficult to enjoy. You and your opponent should both be getting crazy stressed during the game, but you should both be able to end the game, take a deep breath, shake hands and smile, then excitedly recap the game. Not to say it's your fault if they get salty, but you should AIM to avoid that. Playing the game above the table means getting in their head slowly through actions.

So back to the topic, a new player is unpredictable and breaks your patterns. But as a skilled player, you can leverage that very same weakness. Skilled players are used to patterns. That's why we practice and study and practice. When something defies one of the patterns we have prepared for, such as a new player doing something crazy, it really can throw us off our game long enough for them to take a bad move and turn it into a good one, or at least their "okay" move suddenly means all of your moves are no longer as good as they were before.

The best swordsman in the world has nothing to fear from the second best swordsman in the world. But beware the novice, the guy who just picked up the sword. He will do things he shouldn't, and take risks he shouldn't, he doesn't even know he is doing this. This will throw you off and can lead to your downfall.

That's what a very good teacher taught me and I don't see why it wouldn't apply here.

There's a magic article on this. Next Level thinking. Its been well documented. Go look for it. =)

The best swordsman in the world has nothing to fear from the second best swordsman in the world. But beware the novice, the guy who just picked up the sword. He will do things he shouldn't, and take risks he shouldn't, he doesn't even know he is doing this. This will throw you off and can lead to your downfall.

Which is why the best swordsman should make sure he leads the attacks or at least controls things until he determines what his opponent can do.

Murphy's combat laws: A professional soldier is predictable. But the world is full of amatuers.

It seemed fitting. Anyway, good thread Biophysical!

The best swordsman in the world has nothing to fear from the second best swordsman in the world. But beware the novice, the guy who just picked up the sword. He will do things he shouldn't, and take risks he shouldn't, he doesn't even know he is doing this. This will throw you off and can lead to your downfall.

That's what a very good teacher taught me and I don't see why it wouldn't apply here.

Swordsman don't have to deal with dice rolls =). Whenever two players of very close skill level play, unless one player can trick the other and gain a significant advantage early on, dice results at critical moments are going to play a bigger role in the game.

Part of It comes down to "the ways you can lose a game".

People love to blame the Octahedrons of Inevitable Betrayal, and - sometimes - that's going to be the reason. But if we're brutally self-honest, probably not as often as we'd like to claim.

I had a game like that not long ago, where in a head-on pass, six TIE fighters, including howlrunner, managed to mildly inconvenience an A-wing at range 1. But it's like blaming "human error" in air crashes. Yes, the final failure, the one where a news-at-ten leve accident becomes unavoidable, is almost always made by a person behind the stick or a person with a spanner, but you then have to ask "why did that situation come up in the first place?".

In my case, why the hell was I the one getting blocked rather than doing the blocking? The A-wings were PS5 (Veteran Instincts test pilots) and I have two PS5 pilots at my disposal in the TIE Fighter All-Stars. Moving that front rank first would avoid a massive, action-denying car-crash that would take two turns to clear up. I have a 99 point squad to a 100 point squad. So why did I let him move first?

Equally, I had a close game against some Y-wings recently - autoblaster turrets, unhinged astromechs and engine upgrades. I won, just, but the post-game dissection came down to the y-wings not breaking off a head-to-head pass a turn earlier than they did.

The game breaks down into parts:

1. List building. Yes, there are some Scissors-Paper-Stone matchups out there. Take an academy swarm and face a barrage of assault missiles in the opening volley and you're going to struggle. If you haven't got a (rough) plan to handle (a) a token-laden big ship, (b) one or more ships that are ridiculously manouvrable dodging arcs of fire, © a block of 3-4 heavy fighters and (d) a swarm of 12-point gnats, then sooner or later you're going to have to come up with one on the fly....
2. Comprehension. Understanding what your opponent's squad has in it, what it can do, and how he ((probably) plans to use it.
3. Strategy. Whether you want initiative or not. Where to put the obstacles. Where to put your ships. What to do for the first two turns or so. Learning this stage is what really tends to seperate out the 'top table' players - by the time the shooting starts, you're already at a disadvantage. Essentially, what do you want the first pass to look like? Range 2? Range 3 then range 1? Straight to range 1? Head on or off-set?
4. Tactics. This is a mix of poker and geometry. Can you guess what your opponent's going to do, and do you actually know how big your own maneuver templates are? Learning how big they are in base lengths is a godsend. Maneuvering to avoid obstacles is one thing, but figuring out where opponents will end up is a step up, and a step up again from that is learning to allow for the order in which ships move - and where ships will end up if their movement is blocked by other ships. This is where you see players who can dodge arcs of fire annoyingly well, or who can hold an entire swarm's movement options in their head.
5. Luck. A lot of players default to heavily shielded ships - not because ships relying on shields are better than ships relying on green dice, but because they're more reliable. In 5+ games, you'll probably have at least one game where Dark Curse With A Stealth Device And A Focus Token At Range 3 Through An Asteroid gets one-shotted by a half-dead Z-95. The only thing you can do about bad luck is try to create situations where you're not relying on it.

How about you stop underestimating your opponents or overestimating your own abilities? Maybe then you'll be less surprised when someone beats you.

Sorry for the harsh statement, but I'm not feeling comfortable with the sentiment that some players can only win against others by being ignorant or by being so far below their opponent that they trick their way to a win.

More succinctly, does a feint that works on a really good player fail to work on a lesser player because they don't see the threat in the first place?

Interesting question.

I've heard stories and they may very well be urban myths about some chess masters being beat by someone who's understanding of chess is roughly "the horsie goes in a L shape"... Because the other player doesn't get the threat of a strong bishop or a open rank with a rook on it. They play somewhat randomly which throws the standard openings and other gambits out the window.

But like I say that may be more myth than truth...

In X-Wing I suppose there is a point where I can see you have 2 good moves with your Tie Interceptor , you can take move X and boost left, or you can take move Y and barrel roll right. Someone who can't see those two good moves may take move Z and leave the better player out of position because they planned on them picking either X or Y.

But over all I think such a thing would only happen a couple time in a game, because X-Wing is IMO anyway more about *my plan* then reacting to your moves. So while that kind of thing may catch a really good player off guard, I think they'll adjust pretty quickly and fly their plan rather than trying to figure out where you're going.

After all a bad move is a bad move even if you can't capitalize on it right now at worse case you're left even, and it may open up other options for other ships.

Im a chess player and i can say that a really good chess player (even well below master level) would almost never lose to a beginner, they would merely be surprised by what they did in terms of unexpected plays initially but quickly adapt to their play and capitalize quickly on any mistakes the beginner made. Sure, even the chess masters make a stupid move occasionally but this would not be as a result of a lesser opponent and they would likely not lose the game because of it unless their opponent was skilled enough to pick up on his and make them pay immediately. Good chess players notice when their opponent makes a mistake. Thats why they are good. Chess has no luck at all. Its pure tactics and strategy.

X-wing has a significant amount of luck due to the randomness of dice but luck can also come into play by gaining an unexpected advantage from some unplanned ship movement (typically bumping into another ship, even your own ship which actually turns out in your favour). Damage cards also add a luck element. The game has been well set up to allow even a beginner to beat and experienced player.

as a small aside...

There's an element of luck to competitive chess, though you could argue that it's not luck - or that it applies to more than chess.

examples...

1. Chess is incredibly well studied and written about - and there are named setups / openings and game positions / problems where solutions are worked out - very few people know all of them.

What happens when the position ends up being identical to the Cochrane gambit and petrov defense - and you just happen to have studied this position when your opponent hasn't? Do you have an advantage? I'd consider it lucky - especially if you weren't pushing the game to that position.

2. Your opponent who is normally good at reading people and guessing intentions - had a late flight to the tournament, and under normal circumstances you'd probably lose to this opponent in a tournament, but he has a terrible headache and you have an easier game than expected. - lucky for you. Sporting? maybe not.

If he had a headache it's his responsibility to take some aspirin, if he chooses to play while in pain that's his choice not yours.

It would only be unsportsmanlike if you gave the other guy the headache.

A good gambit to use with a bunch of lower PS ships and one higher ps ship (such as academy ties/alpha interceptors and Howl, or binayre pilot z's and VI Xizor) is to move the swarm one way and the higher PS ship another.

I've caught out a flanking Soontir like this (main reason was to double stress him with a flechette torp but I ended up one shotting him with it...).

I've also done the same with Howlrunner, moving the swarm off to attack something while she pulls a 5 straight to chase a wounded A wing, which didnt ptl to defend itself as my opponent assumed howl would stick with the swarm.

Asteroid placement still has me stumped slightly, I know when to try and clutter the board, or when to try and leave huge spaces, but apart from that, well, its often halfway through a game when I realise how my opponent has out played me with roid placement.

I would say not so. Good players should size up what is on the board and play the other side, make decisions as if they were the other player based on the most beneficial move for them. If indeed their opponent picks a different move and it somehow counters, then the "good player" didn't really make a genuine effort. Sometimes an excellent player just needs to fall back on basics of winning the game: shooting up the enemy ships.

In real fighter combat, there are a ton of complicated maneuvers that get crazy names, but you don't just perform those maneuvers because you are skilled or that is in your hand. If an F-18 is coming up behind a bandit who hasn't seen him, there is no maneuver to do other than fly into range and attack.

Well to answer the original questions:

"Do the top tier players have ways of figuring out the level of their opposition to try and figure out what that opposition will react to?"

Yes to the first part. Before the game starts, I'll take a good look at my opponent's squad. If there are a few elements that lack synergy then that will give me a useful hint. The way that my opponent will deploy his asteroids and fleet will tell me the rest of what I need to know. Aside from that, I have my own asteroid deployment strategy and unit deployment that is meant to be adapted to what my opponent will do before the first move.

As for whether I can figure out what my opposition will react to; that's not how I roll. I plan my strategies around what my opponent "can" do. If I fly Soontir, I'll make sure to plan a maneuver which will be less likely to get him blocked. If I fly an IG-88 with advanced sensor, I'll maneuver so that the first round of engagement will likely happen at range 3 and after that, I'll plan my maneuver so that I'll be the one causing a block or get behind them (with an advanced sensor boost + k-turn or s-loop).

Example: if my IG just faced off against Soontir the round before at range 3, I'll plan my next maneuver to either be behind him or k-turn or s-loop right in front of thim. Soontir's maneuvers will either make him overshoot me or cause a bump, which is a win-win for me.

"Do top tier players at low-level events find themselves in bad positions because they play a few games where plays that would work on great competition don't work on people that don't see the implied threat?"

Rarely. Sometimes a new player will bring a completely unexpected combination of upgrade against which I will not have prepared for and underestimated, but that's about it.

I integrate "pattern interrupts" into my gameplan when facing skilled opponents for pretty much this reason. I'll make a move that is intentionally optimal but completely defies and destroys all of their multi-turn planning and forces them to start over. I have to be careful with this to make sure I am not putting myself at a disadvantage. A good example is when I am flying very well and presenting myself as a skilled opponent through my choices and actions (never through bragging, it undermines the pattern interrupt later on). By doing this, I can mentally establish myself to my opponent as a higher level player and they put their A-game on and really start to plan ahead, usually on round 3 or 4 just after opening fire went less favorably for him than he had hoped. With this thought he in his head, he's now expecting smart moves, bluffs and double bluffs, double guesses, arc dodging. He's expecting it all. So, perhaps, instead of doing the best thing and simply arc dodging or pulling away for safer shots, I drop a 4 forward like a total noob and charge in there guns blazing.

This honestly works pretty much every time I manage to pull off the whole gambit. Such a brash and unsafe move is totally unexpected. After all, he knows that, perhaps in that spot, he had a lot of options to block or threaten that spot so there's no way a skilled player would risk it. So when I make a move that a skilled player might not make, I wind up in an advantageous position.

Now the key here isn't to actually have a positional advantage, but to interrupt their mental battle plan and expectations. It creates self doubt and will force them to question your moves much more. Are you good, or lucky? That self doubt really goes a long way towards making mistakes. This is part of winning the game above the table. A pattern interrupt completely shatters an opponents focus.

Imagine it like this. A person you are meeting for the first time reaches out to shake your hand after introducing himself. As soon as you reach out to shake his hand in return, he suddenly bends over and ties his shoe instead, as if that had always been his intent. How does that make you feel? Analyze that feeling, because when you defy your opponents expectations, that's how you make them feel, and it's a powerful tool. Once you have interrupted the pattern, you are in control, and better, you have gotten one step further inside their head.

Remember, the goal is NEVER to be rude or berating to your opponent. Be very careful with your words. You want to get in your opponents head and stress them out without them thinking that you're doing anything unsavory. If you get rude or start probing, they will get focused on how uncomfortable they are with YOU, which may seem like a good thing to some people, but that just makes them question YOUR judgement and their own, meaning they are more likely to start calling TO's over and generally question everything you do. Not saying that your cheating, but by suddenly having to explain and justify everything because they question your judgement means you have to reveal more than you really want too and creates an unpleasant atmosphere that's difficult to enjoy. You and your opponent should both be getting crazy stressed during the game, but you should both be able to end the game, take a deep breath, shake hands and smile, then excitedly recap the game. Not to say it's your fault if they get salty, but you should AIM to avoid that. Playing the game above the table means getting in their head slowly through actions.

So back to the topic, a new player is unpredictable and breaks your patterns. But as a skilled player, you can leverage that very same weakness. Skilled players are used to patterns. That's why we practice and study and practice. When something defies one of the patterns we have prepared for, such as a new player doing something crazy, it really can throw us off our game long enough for them to take a bad move and turn it into a good one, or at least their "okay" move suddenly means all of your moves are no longer as good as they were before.

I think your whole gambit relies on skill vs luck. A player with a higher skill than his opponent will always want skill to have more influence in the game, while the lower skilled player will always want for luck to play a big part, to potentially compensate for the difference in skill. It seems that here you establish yourself as a similarly-skilled player, projecting caution in your moves. While he remains cautious, you spring and "go for it", looking a good exchange of dice at range 1. If your lists are close in terms of firepower, then the dice dictate the rest of the game. Am I correct?

I would say not so. Good players should size up what is on the board and play the other side, make decisions as if they were the other player based on the most beneficial move for them. If indeed their opponent picks a different move and it somehow counters, then the "good player" didn't really make a genuine effort. Sometimes an excellent player just needs to fall back on basics of winning the game: shooting up the enemy ships.

In real fighter combat, there are a ton of complicated maneuvers that get crazy names, but you don't just perform those maneuvers because you are skilled or that is in your hand. If an F-18 is coming up behind a bandit who hasn't seen him, there is no maneuver to do other than fly into range and attack.

Real fighter combat is actually a really good analogy. You never "perform maneuvers" with fancy names as your objective. Your goal is to kill the opposing pilot as quickly and brutally as possible. The best way to do that is to fly in low and behind him where he can't see you, preferably after a dive out of the sun to keep your speed up, squeeze off a murderous burst, and leave. If you do your job, the dead man will have never even known you were there. Maneuvers happen when the other guy is a jerk about it and tries to keep you from brutally killing him. But the maneuvers are never an end-goal in themselves, they are always designed to solve one of the four problems of BFM (Range, Closure, Aspect, and Angle-off) and solving those four problems puts you in the six o'clock position you're describing.

X-Wing works very differently from aerial combat, but I think the principle of simply trying to murder your enemy as brutally and efficiently as possible is probably a good one nonetheless.

This reminds me of something I once heard second hand from a friend. A black belt commented that she preferred to fight newer students over other black belts because she never knew what they were going to do next. Made things more interesting.

Interesting quote, but I don't think it applies so much in X-Wing. Becoming a black belt in most formal martial arts isn't done by winning competitions and actually defeating other fighters, it's done by memorizing hundreds of different forms and techniques in a particular martial art and being able to perform them in sequence under controlled conditions to one, sometimes a few, person's subjective approval.

So it would make sense that a black belt would get bored fighting other black belts, since they are both just competing to see who can execute moves that the other already knows and has likely practiced a counter to every move they know a thousand times. It can easily become 2 people mindlessly testing who has the better muscle memory. A lower belt on the other hand has less rote technique to rely on and will be more likely to resort to improvisation, which will be more mentally challenging to a black belt, since they may not have practiced a thousand times to counter a move they've never seen before, even if that move isn't all that effective.

X-Wing is different, because while there are practiced moves that you can learn in the game, improvisation is necessary at every level of the game, and the better players, the "black belts" of the game, are ones that have practiced their technique so they can perform their openings in their sleep, but can also improvise masterfully to catch rigid opponents off-guard.

But that is definitely a great quote that provides a lot of food for thought.

Fighting was a part of every single belt test I undertook while I was actively training. Kata, or whatever a style calls its forms, is important because it forms muscle memory and assists with conditioning and control. But every martial art is fundamentally about hitting or otherwise disabling an opponent, and any practice that doesn't regularly include combat (albeit controlled and monitored) is missing a critically important piece.

A fight between two experts tends to follow a particular tempo: they watch each other and maneuver for a relatively long time (possibly with some light attacks) until one person thinks he or she sees an opening, then there's a flurry of attempted strikes as they close, then they separate and start watching and maneuvering again. It's not quite thinking, because conscious thinking usually isn't fast enough, but there's a lot of... I don't know, consideration that goes into it. It's not at all an activity that occurs by rote, but it's very conservative and can almost seem slow, if you don't know what to look for.

A fight between an expert and a beginner, though, doesn't have a tempo because there's no maneuvering phase (or if there is, it's typically no more than three seconds). Beginners get impatient and don't see the defenses, so they rush in at inopportune moments. They stage attacks that are uncorrelated with the likelihood of success. They throw all their strength into what should be light attacks, and they essay light attacks where they should commit. It's much more continuous and... not more difficult, but difficult in entirely different ways.

(And there's also the fact that the more experienced fighter is typically considered responsible for keeping everyone from being injured, and that's a much more difficult task when your opponent is at least as likely to injure himself or herself as he or she is to injure you.)

None of this really has much to do with X-wing, because luck plays a huge role and because nothing in X-wing is nearly as unpredictable--there's typically a very limited set of moves available to each ship in a given context. But not all martial arts experts(#NotAllMartialArtists?) are pretty-pretty kata specialists, and in fact black belts that don't wrap their hands in tape on a regular basis are pretty much beginners when it comes to combat anyway.

X-Wing works very differently from aerial combat, but I think the principle of simply trying to murder your enemy as brutally and efficiently as possible is probably a good one nonetheless.

Depends on your squad, of course. For some ships, it's "Rule Number One: Don't Get Killed" - Squints are good examples of a ship where if you have a choice between a head-to-head pass and neither side having a shot, you generally take the latter.

But yes, throwing out fiendish false leads and subtle traps work well in theory and lousy in practice.

The principals of air combat fit in fairly well with X-Wing. Some of the best X-wing Players out there (including some of the well known ones) are US Air Force members who are at least familiar with Air Force Doctrine.

Response to Chilligan:

I can see how that would appear to be the case. However, the 4-forward close in was just an example. Sometimes a hard 1 to suddenly disengage, etc. can be just as game changing. It really has to be carefully calculated with the intent to disarm your opponents plan.

Your opponent was trying to dictate the game, and now, assuming your move was suitably disarming, you've changed the game state significantly. Worst case scenario for you, your opponent still has to restart his planning. He is not in any better a position to dictate the game than you are at this stage. Forcing him to change his plans really goes a long way towards opening up doorways for you to exploit. It's not about rushing in or playing cautiously per se, and it's also not necessarily about establishing one strategy then switching to another. It's about forcing the game state to change, especially when it is in their favor, by defying their expectations. The opportunity doesn't always present itself but when it does, you want to be able to recognize it.

One time I had IG-88 near a decimator, Iggy was up against the board edge. The decimator was angled towards me and a K-turn would have taken me out of his arc and put me behind him and pointed at him. I could tell that his other ships were likely to try to position themselves to get arc's on that position. So, instead, I performed a hard 1 towards the decimators flight path. Doing this gave the decimator a range 1 shot, but I was still out of arc anyway. He didn't expect the move, however, and had been planning to boost to get range 3 away from Iggy's 4k, but now a boost wouldn't even get him out of arc. He had to change his plan starting at that moment and choose just to focus, meanwhile his support flew up to counter the 4k that never happened. I took a much bigger risk by taking that 4 dice shot or misjudging the Decimators movement and ending up in it's front arc, and it might have been better for that one turn to do the 4k and weather the hits from his other ships at range. But, by changing things up unexpectedly and taking a slightly inferior, much more risky move, everything he had was suddenly out of position and the decimator was in an "okay" but not great spot.

I was now able to dictate the game state, as he would have to chase to get arcs back on Iggy, but it would be pretty simple for me to disengage from the decimator and engage the support instead, as they would be more focused on getting back into the fight. By doing something that didn't match up to my general plan (targeting the Decimator first, which I generally save for last) I threw off his plans and he had to adjust, and when he did adjust, I easily capitalized on it to fight his support on my terms instead of his.

X-Wing works very differently from aerial combat, but I think the principle of simply trying to murder your enemy as brutally and efficiently as possible is probably a good one nonetheless.

Depends on your squad, of course. For some ships, it's "Rule Number One: Don't Get Killed" - Squints are good examples of a ship where if you have a choice between a head-to-head pass and neither side having a shot, you generally take the latter.

But yes, throwing out fiendish false leads and subtle traps work well in theory and lousy in practice.

Well, most fighter pilots also avoid the head-on. The head-on pass is the one place where skill as a pilot doesn't matter. If you choose to commit to it, you're giving the enemy a free shot at you in exchange for a free shot at him. The only time you would ever think about doing that is if the enemy is a lousy shot, or a much, much better pilot than you are. But, if you're a fighter pilot, you don't actually believe there is any such thing as a better pilot than you are, so you're going to avoid the head-on.

Avoiding the head-on shouldn't be mistaken as not being aggressive, it's just a channeled and intelligent aggression. You don't fight that fight, you fight your fight, you force it on your opponent. While he's trying to blaze away at you on the head-on, you avoid the shots, and then you steal angles with a hard break across his nose (and under it so he doesn't shoot you). This sets you up with an advantage at the merge and enables you to then move in for the kill from a position where he can't shoot back.