Rules of the Game
In Chaos, rules were bent but not broken.
To be in the game, one has to play by the rules. I thought I was a very good mahjong player until I played the game with a different set of rules. Chongqing Mahjong is slightly different from the Mahjong played in Singapore. There are no tiles of the "winds", "animals" and "flowers". Only "pong" is allowed but not "eating" from the player before you. Although the rules have changed, the objective is still the same - to "hu".
Naively, I thought that if I know the changes to the rules, I could quickly adapt to the game, but how wrong I was. The speed was different, my instinctive reaction was different, my probabilistic calculation was different. Much later, I sat back and reflected about what happened. Rules are made so that everyone can play the game together to compete for the common objective. To win, what I need is not just knowing the rules alone, I need a strategy based on these new rules.
It took me two incidences to realize that rules form the boundaries of the game. To be in the game, you have to abide to the rules. Pool is played differently in Chongqing too. I am more familiar with the 8-ball and 9-ball types but in Chongqing, the game uses 10 balls starting with ball number 6 up to number 15. Each number represents the points and the objective is to win more than half of all available points. No ball-in-hand but each miss shot allows the opponent a 2 stroke opportunity. The basic cuing stroke is the same but one has to understand the rules to formalize a winning strategy.
What we learnt from entertainment can also be applied in other aspects. For example in business, if we do not even understand the rules, how are we going to formulate our strategy? And without a strategy, we will be very much like "a one-legged man in an ass-kicking competition".
To be in the game, one has to play by the rules. I thought I was a very good mahjong player until I played the game with a different set of rules. Chongqing Mahjong is slightly different from the Mahjong played in Singapore. There are no tiles of the "winds", "animals" and "flowers". Only "pong" is allowed but not "eating" from the player before you. Although the rules have changed, the objective is still the same - to "hu".
Naively, I thought that if I know the changes to the rules, I could quickly adapt to the game, but how wrong I was. The speed was different, my instinctive reaction was different, my probabilistic calculation was different. Much later, I sat back and reflected about what happened. Rules are made so that everyone can play the game together to compete for the common objective. To win, what I need is not just knowing the rules alone, I need a strategy based on these new rules.
It took me two incidences to realize that rules form the boundaries of the game. To be in the game, you have to abide to the rules. Pool is played differently in Chongqing too. I am more familiar with the 8-ball and 9-ball types but in Chongqing, the game uses 10 balls starting with ball number 6 up to number 15. Each number represents the points and the objective is to win more than half of all available points. No ball-in-hand but each miss shot allows the opponent a 2 stroke opportunity. The basic cuing stroke is the same but one has to understand the rules to formalize a winning strategy.
What we learnt from entertainment can also be applied in other aspects. For example in business, if we do not even understand the rules, how are we going to formulate our strategy? And without a strategy, we will be very much like "a one-legged man in an ass-kicking competition".
Labels: Business
posted by cif5000 at 1:04 AM
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