How To Solo

Joe Brennan


I asked a lot of soloists for their views. This is what I’ve compiled for you. Some of it flies in the face of “common wisdom”. There are many guidelines, but for each of them there are (invariably) exceptions. Accept these as guidelines rather than law.

This has been discussed in many worthy articles. In a nutshell:

Solo Stats

45% of all games on the Judges end in solos. In games with experienced players, that goes down to about 39%. Some countries are definitely more likely to provide you with solos than others. Here are the stats from 2317 games:
Russia17.8%
France16.8%
Turkey14.9%
Germany14.8%
Austria13.1%
England12.7%
Italy10.0%

If experienced soloists spent more time playing Italy, its stats would improve – right? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the solo is made by the player, not the country. Sure, it's easier when you're France or Russia, but that only goes to ensure that great players keep putting IA at the bottom of their preference lists. So long as Italy can claim 10% of all solos, it's demonstrating that an Italian solo is a very real possibility. In fact, I'm half inclined to start asking for Italy, just to see if I can do it! (Well, maybe not this year.)

Conclusion

Eh? This article IS the conclusion! The original article was 18 typed pages long! And the research took months.

I hope you feel more equipped to not settle for more draws. There are times when a draw is a good idea – when you have two SCs, and each of your two remaining opponents have 16 SCs. But there' s a lot more fun in turning a fairly even three way into a solo than accepting a draw. My last six game results have been solos.

Go ye and do likewise.

Joe Brennan
(jgbrennan@iprimus.com.au)

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