Speed dice #1: Does this article on "countering speed dice" make any sense at all?

I almost thought we were playing a different game!

http://www.cheapass.com/bpu/strategy6.html

I think this article may have been written before the growth of the buttonmen.com web game -- back when people thought Tirade was really strong, etc. But still, the notion that what you want are lots of dice of different sizes! There MIGHT be something to the idea that you want
to get initiative: any speed attack your opponent can make is also a skill attack you can make on her, if you go first --Bunnies is actually a pretty good button against recipes with speed dice, both since it will get initiative and because the dice don't change when you reroll them.

Still, your main hope in defanging Bennett is that you won't be a target -- and if all your dice are large, it's much less likely that they'll be vulnerable to a massive speed attack.

Forgetting poison, etc, for the moment, look at Bennett's record against Soldiers buttons:
Bennet wins against all of them, but there's a big difference between winning 56% of his
games, or even 59%, and winning 76% or more. Admittedly, I suspect
Changeling, in particular, is not well-played against Bennett -- maybe all of these numbers would be a little lower with better play (I think Bennett is much easier to play in all these matchups than his opponent) -- I'll also confess to being a little puzzled by Kublai's relatively good showing on this list - maybe it's that "disparate dice" thing!

Hammer (Soldiers)	78/61 = 139	56.11%
Kublai (Soldiers)	13/9 = 22	59.09%
Shore (Soldiers)	58/40 = 98	59.18%
Karl (Soldiers)	16/8 = 24	66.66%
Changeling (Soldiers)	13/4 = 17	76.47%
Iago (Soldiers)	24/7 = 31	77.41%
Avis (Soldiers)	51/12 = 63	80.95%
Stark (Soldiers)	56/14 = 70	80%
Bauer (Soldiers)	19/4 = 23	82.6%
Clare (Soldiers)	32/7 = 39	82.05%
Hannah (Soldiers)	20/4 = 24	83.33%
Niles (Soldiers)	21/3 = 24	87.5%
Kith (Soldiers)	14/1 = 15	93.33%

And note that Giant, whose overall record against ALL buttonmen is about 56%, does nearly that well against Bennett:

Giant (Brom)

51/42 = 93

54.83%

And Yeti does BETTER against Bennett than its overall record of about 60%:

Yeti (Majesty)

52/146 = 198

26.26%

(though the question there might be what percentage of these Yeti-Bennett games were played by Anders as this is pretty close to HIS average value with Yeti...)


aside from what button to play, there's also the question of how to play the button against speed dice -- of course, all things being equal, you want to try to take speed dice early, though small speed dice may not be that big a threat. And you want to be very alert when rolling your dice how much risk you are exposing yourself to -- you want to minimize the chance that you roll into a speed attack. That usually means you'd prefer to roll as few dice as possible and you are alert to the values on your unrolled dice -- ideally they add up to as few threatening values as possible. Some illustrations might make this more clear, but I'll either have to construct
them or play a bunch of games against speed dice to generate examples.