Life In 19x19

This is a potential minefield, but there is a lot of research on how risk-taking relates to gender.

Recently, researchers have found an interesting result about risk preferences in chess. Men play differently depending on whether their opponent is a man or a woman. On average, a male chess player playing against a woman will choose riskier openings than if he were matched against a man of similar strength. The difference is rather small, but it seems as if the researchers have demonstrated that it's a real effect produced by the gender of the players.

The research was for chess only, but it probably would apply to go. For those who are interested, there is an article on chessbase (http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6595).

by "play risky" do you mean overplays?

I don't know about gender, but I tend to make more overplays against weaker (or perceived weaker) players.

i heard many professionals agree that women play more aggresively.
but i dont agree with that. i am thinking they are weaker so they take more risk.

Magicwand wrote:i heard many professionals agree that women play more aggresively.
but i dont agree with that. i am thinking they are weaker so they take more risk.

Boom! goes the minefield.

Magicwand wrote:i heard many professionals agree that women play more aggresively.
but i dont agree with that. i am thinking they are weaker so they take more risk.

My friend, you just set off a wave of controversy! Run for the hills!

I'm an aggressive player in chess, and playing against females of a similar strength I know that I would indeed play more aggressively than if I was playing another male.

I don't know. I play on kgs, and I don't know if it's a male or female sitting in the other end.

Having played a number of go games face to face against both genders, I suspect it is the other way round for me. Interestingly, it may be the personality types that are drawn to the two, as opposed to gender specifics. At the risk of increasing the minefield, my experience with chess was generally a lot more "must win at all cost" diehard competitive types, generally male, who saw women as people you shouldn't be seen to lose to. My experience with go players on the other hand has been more pleasant.

Interestingly, I could believe it if they found the opposite, as I'm certain I know some players who "go easy" on women, I suspect as a subconscious (yet patronising!) desire not to bully them because they are female.

Gender has never made much odds to the way I play (at least, I don't think so ), but I suspect I do slightly prefer an unknown player that I get drawn against to be female rather than male. This isn't a conscious decision, but I think it is probably due to almost all the females (with one exception) I have played have been pleasant to play (gracious winners, gracious losers, friendly off the board etc). Most males have also been pleasant, but there have been far more exceptions

Magicwand wrote:i heard many professionals agree that women play more aggresively.
but i dont agree with that. i am thinking they are weaker so they take more risk.

Foot in mouth...

Magicwand wrote:i heard many professionals agree that women play more aggresively.
but i dont agree with that. i am thinking they are weaker so they take more risk.

damn, i just realized that i read the question wrong.

but i stany by what i said. when i said "women" i meant female professionals.
and it is a fact that they are weaker than men (male professionals).
and reason for the is that they are weaker and do take more unnecessary risks.

There was a similar study involving skateboarders. (Heterosexual) men do all kinds of things differently when women are around. I don't think this is a surprise to anyone. A lot of it is subconscious.

I recall one study... Some young men were called into a room individually and told to walk on a treadmill (they were given some fib about what the test was about to make the test blind). After a minute or two a "test administrator" (attractive young woman in a lab coat) came out from behind a door to give them some instructions. The woman then left the room and the walking resumed. The guy on the treadmill actually changes his strut afterwards, realizing that he's being watched by a woman.

Getting onto a side topic which Magicwand has touched on; it may be that the relative strength of male and female professionals and the dearth of women at the highest levels can be accounted for only by lower rates of participation.

Take a population with a normal (bell curve) distribution of skill levels, and randomly divide that population into two groups, one significantly larger than the other. The very strongest members of the largest group are going to be significantly stronger than the members of the smaller group.

As an example, I wrote a quick simulation. 10,000 individuals, 15% "female" and 85% "male". I assigned them "skill levels" at random according to a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 10. Running the simulation 10,000 times, the top 10 "men" averaged a "skill level" of about 133.1, and the top 10 "women" about 127.8. The ratio of men to women in professional chess is supposedly something like 16:1. Give my population that ratio and the top 10 men average 133.4 and the top 10 women average 124.6.

This study found that relative rankings of top male and female chess players is mostly consistent with this kind of effect. In other words, the difference between male and female skill levels in high level chess play can be mostly accounted for by participation rates.

Personally, I'll sometimes start out a game a little more aggressively against an unfamiliar female player in a F2F setting than I would against a male player in an identical setting, but typically stop after that early part of the game. I guess it's a kind of testing (at my poor SDK level) to try to see early on what kind of game it'll be.

Main exception: If they are under 12 years old. Go kids (both genders) are scary and I can't try to intimidate them with my cigarette stink anymore since I stopped smoking.

Bruce "Coffee Breath" Young

I have a very small sample, I'll admit, but women around my rank seem to be a lot more violent than I am, if anything. I don't think I change my style based on gender of my opponent (I play crazy against everyone). Of course it's easy to deceive yourself about that sort of thing, but I'm pretty sure.

xed_over wrote:by "play risky" do you mean overplays?

I don't know about gender, but I tend to make more overplays against weaker (or perceived weaker) players.

The chess study involved strong players rating openings as "solid" or "aggressive". I assume that if the effect holds in go, it would work for "honte" vs. "overplay" as well as "aggressive" vs. "solid" or some similar descriptions.