Games like League of Legends and most physical sports are red-herrings when it comes to thoughtful strategy, because frequently you can win these games by simpl

Games like League of Legends and most physical sports are red-herrings when it comes to thoughtful strategy, because frequently you can win these games by simply outperforming your opponent in raw strength or agility, even if they have the theoretically superior strategy. Among these games, it is relatively uncommon to have perfectly matched opponents where strategy determines the victor. A strategic culture based on these games might think that brute force is always the best "strategy". Sound familiar? I think the best game to teach the essence of strategy is Roshambo, or "Rock-Paper-Scissors". According to game theory, the optimal strategy (Nash Equilibrium) is to pick your move at uniform random, in which case you will "not lose" 66% of the time. But in face-to-face practice, a skilled Roshambo player will outright win more than 33% of games. How? Because humans are not robots and aren't good at RNG. Fundamentally, strategy is not about studying game rules and theory! It is about understanding your opponent's perspective and thus forecasting their next move. RPS provides an excellent platform for understanding strategy in this context, especially when done in real-time, face-to-face. Even in the domain of robots, RPS offers insight into how a simple but nontrivial game can lead to complex metagames of composite strategies. See how Python bots can achieve 80% winrate against a field of lesser bots [1]. [1] - www.rpscontest.com/leaderboard