I used to play this game quite a lot, back when Six was the strongest AI opponent. Managed to beat it at 11x11, no chance at 8x8. At 13x13 it completely fell ap

I used to play this game quite a lot, back when Six was the strongest AI opponent. Managed to beat it at 11x11, no chance at 8x8. At 13x13 it completely fell apart (but you had to kind of hack the engine to even play at that size, so it might have been buggy). Now I guess the AlphaZero-variants win everything there as elsewhere. There was a kid from Poland who was insanely good. Maciej Celuch. Don't know what's become of him, but wouldn't be a kid any longer. He was the top player by a mile, won the Little Golem tournaments every year he participated. A bunch of people from the same town in Poland were also really, really good, I guess they had a bit of a community going. The other place there was a bit of community going was in Oslo, a bunch of guys associated with the defense research institute (FFI). I went to an offline tournament with them once, to my surprise I didn't finish quite last. I think it's a satisfying game, because it's quite easy to learn to look far ahead. Since the pieces stay put, it's much easier to reason about positions. M. Seymour's online book is great, too. I've heard good things about Ryan B. Hayward's book. Cameron Browne is a nice guy and has done a lot of other cool work in combinatorial games, but I can't recommend his old Hex book. The tactics advice is not good.