Breaks and early games.

I thought I'd start of with giving you some insight on how to think about the game during the first couple of shots so that you can gain an advantage into the later parts of the set.

If you start as Red you might feel disadvantaged since you have to get all of your chips in before your opponent to atleast score a tie. Don't let this get to you, remember that you have an advantage aswell since you can control how you want the opening of the game to look like. If you know your oppontents weak points this can be a great advantage.

Anyways, when you do your break there are basically three different type of breaks: The Tap Break, Semi-Tap and a the Full Force Break.

The tap break will work best for those who feet somewhat inferior to their opponent in the game play. The idea is that you wont give your opponent a single chance of sweeping the board at all. Instead you'll break him down slowly by strategical play in which we'll discuss more in a later article on the mid and late game. A lot of people denounce this break as just destroying the game all together, the pace of the game slows down too much and it makes it more boring. Personally, I agree with this criticism to an extent, but just like pushing, I do believe most of the condemnation comes from people who doesn't understand what to do.

When you do the Tap Break you have to think about a couple of things in the first couple of shots and that are not to try to sink too many chips, especially as red. You want there to be more of your chips in the big lump in the center than there are of theirs. Why? You might correctly ask? The answer is simple, the more chips you have in the center lump, the harder it will be for your opponent to sink all of his.

Think of it like this, lets say you have 10 red chips in the center all in a big chunk, and your opponent is green and it's his turn, he only have one green chip left in the center of all red, blocked in all directions. How can he proceed, no matter what he does he can not sink his, and even if he pushed you he probably wouldn't get his green in the next shot anyways. This is sort of an extreme example but the likelyhood of your opponent sinking all his chips on the next move in the center declines as the ratio of your chips to his increases. I will discuss on how to successfully do this in a later article.

Now on to the Semi-Tap. This is a useful break, in which I have had much success. The main reason is that it often with around, 30-40 % power will get one of yours and maybe one of your opponents chip behind his line. Plus it spreads the board a little extra than your ordinary Tap Break. Hence there will often be very few options from the get-go for your opponent to get the chips that get behind the line. Unlike the Tap Break where your opponent can easily sink all of the chips you push with a safe 3-waller.

There are a few cons with this break aswell as you should be very well aware of. Since it spreads the board to a degree it will also increase the likelyhood that you will set up easy corner pushes for your opponent so if you want to use this break you need to be able to get good at getting cornershots from close range since the cross board shot will often be blocked in the beginning. If you're playing a very good sweeper you should not do this break, because these types of breaks are just the kind a good sweeper loves, the challenge gives him that extra focus he often do not get on a full force break.

Last but not least, to the Full Force Break. This is used in almost every normal game on Shockplay and most other Couronne-sites aswell. But only used by a handful of elite players in what is regarded as serious games. The reason for this is simple, you don't want random chance to control the outcome of your game. But if you overcome the fear of randomness in your breaks this can be very useful if used with a good sense strategy and it has been proven successful to a lot of it's users.

The reason of this is often psychological. A green player who gets a Full Force break against them will often give in to the temptation of trying to sweep the board. If you do not feel 100 % sure that you will sweep a full force break you should never attempt it, because that is just what your opponent want!

Why? Because if you try and fail which happens most of the time you will most likely fail on your last 3 or 4 shots, or even later. Giving your opponent a clean board to sink all of his chips with ease.

There are also a few other good things about the Full Force Break, the randomness can work with you, doesn't always work against you. You can get crazy lucky and get your opponent behind his own hole or something like that in the break which will gain you a huge advantage aswell.

To end this first article, you might ask yourself which one is best to use? The answer is not as clear as anyone can think and my suggestion is to try to weight the pros and cons of every break and adapt to what you make of your opponents skills.

Well now I got pretty tired of writing, so I'll try to update this later if I feel I missed out on something.

Best regards,

Hektor