Psychology is always at play.

As for dice...
You see what you expect to see - it is confirmation bias. Unless you keep massively detailed logs (I know a player who does) - chances are you remember the dice rolls that are memorable, and forget those that are not. Confirmation bias.

Psychology is always at play.

As for dice...

You see what you expect to see - it is confirmation bias. Unless you keep massively detailed logs (I know a player who does) - chances are you remember the dice rolls that are memorable, and forget those that are not. Confirmation bias.

Absolutely. And I think it's important to say that psychology doesn't have to be trying to intimidate someone - in fact I think it never should be that. It's about misdirection and all-around tricksyness

Psychology is always a thing. I sometimes explicitely look whether a right turn would fit, while I'll be K-turning anyway, just to throw my opponent off his game. This game really is a pokerface game sometimes.

Psychology is always at play.

As for dice...

You see what you expect to see - it is confirmation bias. Unless you keep massively detailed logs (I know a player who does) - chances are you remember the dice rolls that are memorable, and forget those that are not. Confirmation bias.

It's the first time I have ever swapped dice in any game I have played (Warhammer or x wing) and it's bothered be since that I did it because I like to think I'm not one of "those" guys.

Psychology is important. That's why I never play without something massively trollish, usually Omega Leader. Either your opponent ignores them and gets annoyed by them, or focusses way too hard on them and the rest of your list kills them.

I like Omega Leader more than is healthy.

Boba Fett and 4LOM are similar. As is the Stresshog.

say things like " oo maybe you should boosty barrel roll" or "maybe I went the way you think i did.... or maybe not"

With babytalk like that, you wouldn't psyche me out. Maybe annoy me a little.

say things like " oo maybe you should boosty barrel roll" or "maybe I went the way you think i did.... or maybe not"

With babytalk like that, you wouldn't psyche me out. Maybe annoy me a little.

Annoying you is psyching you out people who are angry are more prone to make mistakes and rash decisions.

say things like " oo maybe you should boosty barrel roll" or "maybe I went the way you think i did.... or maybe not"

With babytalk like that, you wouldn't psyche me out. Maybe annoy me a little.

I'd find it funny. Which would still be a distraction.

say things like " oo maybe you should boosty barrel roll" or "maybe I went the way you think i did.... or maybe not"

With babytalk like that, you wouldn't psyche me out. Maybe annoy me a little.

Annoying you is psyching you out people who are angry are more prone to make mistakes and rash decisions.

You'd need more than a minor annoyance to affect my reasoning or planning.

say things like " oo maybe you should boosty barrel roll" or "maybe I went the way you think i did.... or maybe not"

With babytalk like that, you wouldn't psyche me out. Maybe annoy me a little.

Annoying you is psyching you out people who are angry are more prone to make mistakes and rash decisions.

You'd need more than a minor annoyance to affect my reasoning or planning.

What about my regular quotes from Archer and Monty Python?

say things like " oo maybe you should boosty barrel roll" or "maybe I went the way you think i did.... or maybe not"

With babytalk like that, you wouldn't psyche me out. Maybe annoy me a little.

Annoying you is psyching you out people who are angry are more prone to make mistakes and rash decisions.

You'd need more than a minor annoyance to affect my reasoning or planning.

What about my regular quotes from Archer and Monty Python?

You're not the Messiah!

You're a very naughty boy!

Hmm, hope none of my regular opponents are reading this...

But to sorta psyche them out, I tend to put my dials on the side of the ship opposite of where I'm going... and look at areas of the table I have no intention of going into... then I end up psyching myself out and change my dial.

Psychology is a big part of tabletop wargames.

I've won games of 40k by it, usually involving my friend refusing to put units on the table, keeping them in reserve because he hates my Lias Issodon turn 0 attack so much. But forgets about Lias shennanigans when it comes to reserves...

Similarly his hatred of my Lasbacks means he's wasted too much effort trying to kill them, leading to me catching him out easily.

Psychology can also lead to dumb mistakes, even forfeiting a game when you still have a fighting chance. Heck i've gone done that.

Admittedly none of this is me psyking out my opponent, indeed I point blank refuse to trash talk.

In online games, where we have a team going it's good to keep a positive party vibe. If you fail an IRL leadership check you get defeated more.

If you have modifiers going they fail LESS.

Psychology is always at play.

As for dice...

You see what you expect to see - it is confirmation bias. Unless you keep massively detailed logs (I know a player who does) - chances are you remember the dice rolls that are memorable, and forget those that are not. Confirmation bias.

The joys of vassal where you can load up logs and see exactly how your dice did for you (I cant recall a game on an actual table where I completely blame my dice, partly for that reason, I dont keep track to say exactly how they did, but Ive definitely had both red and green dice swing notivably (and provably) one way or the other on vassal

About talking possible strategies with your opponent:

You may psych them out... or unknowingly give them hints that allow them to better defeat you. I've had an opponent once say: "**** that ion, oh well, at least I'll still have my action."

To which I started thinking: "right, he still has his action... what can I do to screw this up? Oh here, this will work wonders! Good thing he mentionned it!"

So it can work for or against you.

As for dice rituals

Do whatever makes you happy. As long as the ritual does not involve throwing a dice in your opponent's eye (or anything else that causes injuries) then knock yourself out. My own ritual involves ion hits. If I ion a target to death then I get the bounty and my dice reward me for the following games. It makes no sense, but it makes me smile (sadistically).

Being social during a game is fine. If you realize that psyching out your opponent gives you an advantage - no, I don't consider that part of any game. I think people should be unhindered as they try to think a few steps ahead to predict your moves, and not to be distracted by any momentum you set up by the way you speak or act. Poker is different, many times where money is involved. This isn't poker.

After you've played this game for a while, you really can tell when the dice are rolling above or below average. You can play perfectly and still lose to bad dice rolls. Sometimes, it really is the dice.

Yes, but again this is statistics. Small sample sizes will lead to outliers. When my opponent is apologising for the rolls happening to both of us, that's a good sign that something is not right. However, it's as likely to happen in your favor as against you.

playing mind games is basically all of the fun in any game

honestly, what'd poker be without it? it'd be garbage; pure luck!

At mid-limit hold'em, which is what I mostly play, poker is more like 75% math. Much of the rest is luck.

Psychology is a big part of no-limit play, and the percentage climbs as the stakes do. But even at its highest, it's maybe 20% at most. Even at the highest levels of no-limit, poker is more than 50% math.

To answer the OP, as long as you aren't hectoring, you're fine. There are no rules, outside of sportsmanship limits, on how much you can talk or what about. And the sportsmanship limit would be, IMO, "Can you do me a favor and not be quite so chatty while I'm thinking?"

At the Fresno Regionals, a friend of mine pulled me aside and told me about a guy who -- he believed -- was stalling him and trying to psych him out by tell him (my friend) about all of his current horrendous financial and family problems. I know it makes me a terrible person -- well, maybe only if the stories were true -- but I had to laugh at that. Pretty ballsy ... and pathetic at the same time. (My friend told him, "I'm very sorry for your problems, but you really need to pick up the pace.")

But I never blame dice - honestly if I loose, I think about how I could have flown better and what lessons I can draw from my loss.

But that's the silliest thing about the "never blame dice" crowd: sometimes -- quite often, in a game like X-Wing -- dice do have a significant, sometimes overwhelming, effect on who comes out the winner.

Blaming dice too much is bad. But the inability to recognize when a game outcome has been a product of the dice is, in many way, worse. To evaluate the strength of a squadron, you must test the squadron ... and you will lose games, if you are playing against decent players. Many times, you can trace those losses to your opponents' superior performance, or to your mistakes. But sometimes you can't .

And recognizing that "sometimes" is important. First, it allows you to avoid completely counting that game against the squadron you're testing. If you rolled 50% of your expectation on red dice, you were not going to win that game. It has little, perhaps nothing, to do with the actual quality of the squad you built. Second, it allows you to nevertheless get some value from the test -- rough value, but value nevertheless -- by mentally adjusting for the luck swings.

And that's true no matter which was the luck swings. I have a friend (same guy from the Fresno story above) who is almost incapable of recognizing legitimate luck swings in one direction or another. Accordingly, he bases the performance of his squadron solely on the outcome: if it wins, it's awesome, and he keeps playing it ... until it loses, and then it sucks and he tweaks it heavily or moves on.

He's not otherwise a bad player at all ... but his inability to accurately evaluate luck swings -- for or against -- when he's playing holds him back significantly. He simply doesn't have the framework he needs to really stick with and understand a squadron before fluke wins or fluke losses make him draw premature conclusions from it. (He got 2nd after Swiss in Fresno -- his best performance ever -- and the first words to me after he lost his Top Eight game were, "I need to change my list.")

Luck really happens. Pretending that it doesn't, and refusing to mentally adjust for it when evaluating a game ... well, it may not be as annoying to other folks as complaining about the dice, but it's at least as detrimental to one's development as a player.

My friend Geordan has a joke: "It's not bitching ... it's journalism ."

The joys of vassal where you can load up logs and see exactly how your dice did for you (I cant recall a game on an actual table where I completely blame my dice, partly for that reason, I dont keep track to say exactly how they did, but Ive definitely had both red and green dice swing notivably (and provably) one way or the other on vassal

Lady Luck is pretty good, and I'm very glad it exists, even were it only for the raw numbers, so I don't have to track them myself.

But it has its own limitations, primarily on its equal weighting of late-game luck with early game luck. Early game luck is almost always far more significant.

To put it another way, Lady Luck could say that both players had exactly average luck ... and yet the actual fact is that one player was far luckier than the other, because his unmodified HHHC+Direct Hit against Soontir's Autothruster+Focus+Palpatine BBBB came early in the game, and that outlier was buried in the stats, for both players, as the game ground on the the probably inevitable conclusion.

Lady Luck is a good tool, but recognize its limitations.

When my opponent is apologising for the rolls happening to both of us, that's a good sign that something is not right. However, it's as likely to happen in your favor as against you.

It is, yes. However, that does not mean that -- in the past -- it has happened equally often in your favor as against you. (In fact, it would be fairly astonishingly rare for that to be true.)

And understanding how both of those statements are true -- "in the future, it is as likely as not you'll be the lucky one" and "in the past, you may well have much more often been the unlucky one" -- is actually one of the biggest hurdles human psychology has with probability.

The joys of vassal where you can load up logs and see exactly how your dice did for you (I cant recall a game on an actual table where I completely blame my dice, partly for that reason, I dont keep track to say exactly how they did, but Ive definitely had both red and green dice swing notivably (and provably) one way or the other on vassal

Lady Luck is pretty good, and I'm very glad it exists, even were it only for the raw numbers, so I don't have to track them myself.

But it has its own limitations, primarily on its equal weighting of late-game luck with early game luck. Early game luck is almost always far more significant.

To put it another way, Lady Luck could say that both players had exactly average luck ... and yet the actual fact is that one player was far luckier than the other, because his unmodified HHHC+Direct Hit against Soontir's Autothruster+Focus+Palpatine BBBB came early in the game, and that outlier was buried in the stats, for both players, as the game ground on the the probably inevitable conclusion.

Lady Luck is a good tool, but recognize its limitations.

Granted. Though thats where the graphs and the page of the raw dice rolls can come in useful, to see sprcific points in the game as opposed to the overall results

Do some dice research and the manufacturing process. You will learn a lot about dice. Half of the peopling blaming dice do have a scientific reason behind their claim. After you play table top games for over 20 years you pick up on this dice problem.

I always try and screw with my opponents when possible, just to get that advantage. It's easier at a local level but by far my two favorite tactics are:

1. showing my opponents a picture of them leaving their houses in the mornings

2. finding out their mum's name and casually dropping it into conversation, repeatedly. Note: It does not matter how old the mother is, the impact remains the same.