Chuck Uherske
United States
Rockville
Maryland
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We had made plans to meet at 8 AM at the Cafe for games, but I prevailed upon Ben to show early at 7:30 for a quick game of Focus.
I have been playing Focus a fair amount lately, and it is quickly becoming one of my favorite games. Two person spatial abstracts are not high on my aptitude meter, but this game is so elegant that one can't help but think about it, forcing one to progress up the learning curve.
I have been whipping everyone in sight lately, but mostly beginners, and mostly various of my in laws. I had played Ben on two previous occasions, and despite his professed discomfort with the game, he had beaten me both times. I wanted to know whether I was just slipping up against him, or whether he really does have a special aptitude for this that makes him stronger than me despite my frequent play.
I started the way I usually do, trying to line up multiple rows and columns to eventually converge on a center point. And Ben started making some trouble for me fairly early on. But I stayed "focused," as it were, and managed to avoid some traps.
In the past, with Ben, I've made the mistake of staying too fixated on the overall symmetric strategy and failing to stay on top of the immediate capture situation. You can never lose sight of that in this game. If there is a tall stack to control, and to seize reserves from, you simply can't pass up the chance. A reserve advantage in Focus is something like a pawn advantage in chess, in that a good player should be able to win once he has that advantage. I actually think it's a more decisive advantage than that, for even a not-so-good player should be able to turn it into a win.
The turning point in this game came relatively early on. I had a decent position across the horizontal in the middle, and Ben made some moves that surprised me and challenged me there, and it wasn't clear who would come out on top when the smoke cleared. I congratulated myself on finding a counterintuitive move that brought additional material into the line. Ben then made a slight error on his next play, and I immediately capitalized to get an advantage in captures and reserves.
From that point, it was simply a matter of not screwing up, and seizing additional captures and reserves whenever I could. Reserves are definitely superior, I've found. Captures are nice, but they can wait. What you really need to be able to do is to control the stacks of 5 and the tactics that arise from them.
The game became pretty one-sided after that. Probably makes the game less fun, but as I was finally establishing that I could beat Ben, I didn't mind that the game grew out of hand pretty quickly.
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