Max vs. Bluff update

No puzzle here...

irilyth and I played two games of : Max (p12 p12 p20 p20 p30 p30 pX pX)
vs. Bluff (ps6 ps12 16 20 X) to illustrate the subtleties of Swing die choice for Max. When irilyth played Max, he chose X=20. When I played him, I chose... well, what would you pick?

I didn't choose Bluff at random for this test, I thought it would make a good illustration --
I wanted a button that was worth 35 sides or fewer when captured, and Bluff (worth 31 points when fully captured by Max) might actually be easier for Max than a pure vanilla (non-poison) button with that many sides -- Bluff has the offensive capability of 58 sides, which makes it a little easier to get him to swallow big poison. Also Max could find ways to take advantage of the shadow dice, with some effort.

After starting the rounds, I noticed -- to my surprise -- that on the buttonmen.com statistics pages, out of the 11 previous Max vs. Bluff games played on the buttonmen.com website, Max had lost ALL of them -- had I picked a hopeless example?

As it turned out -- and as is so often the case with Max -- the previous statistics were not a good measure of his true capabilities. [Of course, our two games don't constitute absolute proof of anything, either, but I think it was clear from the playing that, while Bluff probably has an advantage over Max, with reasonable play, it's not an overwhelming, green-highlighted-in-the-statistics kind of advantage.]

In our games, Max lost 3-0 when playing with X=20, but won a squeaker when playing with X=... (oh, right, maybe I'll tell you later).

I'm happy to try this one again with anyone -- feel free to challenge me to either side of Max vs. Bluff!