Twixt resources

It has recently come to my attention that there may be players here who are unaware of the Twixt resources that are available for improvement. Many of these resources are way before MY time here, but at least I managed to find out about them.

A visit to Alan Hensel's profile page will direct you to several links; one of which contains the 40 'classic' Twixt puzzles created by the founder, our hero, the late Alex Randolf, along with additional puzzles created by 'master' Hensel. Note: to my knowledge, Alan has been working to update and restore several of his resources.

A visit to Kd Hoffman's profile page will lead you to his Wetpaint site, with several articles on Twixt strategy written by himself, Mr. Hensel, and maybe a few others.

Beyond that, I belive that Mr. David Bush has some contributions at various sites, notably the boardgamegeek website.

This gets me to my 'main' point: can we update and add to the existing 'body of literature' about Twixt? This remains my favorite game to play, above even Chess (in which I am a very experienced tournament player). I believe that Mr. Hoffman's wetpaint page has been taken over by the wiki foundation; perhaps I'm not correct here, but my feeling is that, with proper instruction on how to write instructive articles and how to post instructive articles, there are some players here who will be delighted to share their insights about this great game.

I'd write some articles myself, if I only knew how (specifically, I'd need to know how to embed Twixt positions into text-based articles and to upload them to the site; also I'd need to know how to change and edit existing articles); I don't know how to do any of this stuff! Keep in mind that anything written by me would be at the level of a 1700 player; it would naturally contain omissions and errors; I believe that the 'concept' of a wiki is that posts can be updated and corrected as required, and thus the body of knowledge gets better and better. If I had the time now (I don't) I could get deeply into the subject of 'why?', but the bottom lines are that I do not see a day in our lifetimes where Twixt will be marketed or manufactured again, and no matter HOW superb players may get at this site, there will be NO reward, NO money, NO accolades, and NO recognition - other than that by your peers and colleagues. So why do anything? Well - it's all just for us, and for personal satisfaction, I guess.
Furthermore, MEOW!

Hensel
http://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/info/player.jsp?plid=2674

Hoffmann
http://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/info/player.jsp?plid=11678

[Tip: don't try to post a message on LG *before* logging in. Always ctrl+a ctrl+c copy before posting, just in case.]

I have no plans to update any of my Twixt resources in the near future, aside from commenting on Commentator.

It would be nice to see new material on Hoffman's Twixt wiki. As for the level of technical mastery required, you don't need to know HTML. It's a little tedious to take screenshots of Twixt positions (cmd+shift+4 on a Mac) and include them, but it's not hard.

If you don't think you know enough to contribute, please consider that advanced beginners are sometimes better teachers for beginners than experts, because the experts have a harder time remembering what it was like to be a beginner. Mistakes on a wiki will be corrected, anyway.

And as always, don't be afraid to ask questions on Commentator. The better you are at Twixt strategy, the more fun it gets.

Bump

I tried first move statistics from Alan page but the link misses.

My Mindspring pages might be going away.

I put a backup copy of the First Move Stats on Google Sheets here

Eh, markdown doesn't work, I guess. I meant here

Thank you, Alan, for your many contributions. Readers should know that the "Analyze game" link on every Twixt game page here was also something Alan did. Its original intention was as a post mortem discussion site, not for working out moves during a game. It's still a great resource for such discussion, and I wish more players would take advantage of it.

Hardcore analysis fanatics might like to use Jtwixt, a Java applet which does not play the game, but allows you to examine and store an entire tree of variations for a game, not just the main line. If you evaluate the leaf nodes yourself as win, loss, advantage to vertical, tie, etc. then Jtwixt will automatically update all the parent nodes. Alan's analysis page allows users to download a Jtwixt file for each game.

BTW, I notice the first move stats were last updated in 2013...