Pente
Pente
- Pente** is an abstract strategy board game for two or more players, created in 1977 by Gary Gabrel. A member of the [[m,n,k-game|m,n,k game]] family, Pente stands out for its custodial capture mechanic, which allows players to "sandwich" pairs of stones and capture them by flanking them on either side. This changes the overall tactical assessments players face when compared to pure placement m,n,k games such as [[gomoku]].
Rules Pente is played on a 19x19 grid of intersections similar to a Go board. Players alternate placing stones of their color on empty intersections, with White always assuming the opening move. The goal of the game is to either align five or more stones of the same color in a row in any vertical, horizontal or diagonal direction or to make five captures.
Stones are captured by custodial capture (flanking an adjacent pair of an opponent's stones directly on either side with your own stones). Captures consist of exactly two stones; flanking a single stone or three or more stones does not result in a capture. As an example, if the stones are ⚫⚪⚪▁ and Black places their stone so it becomes ⚫⚪⚪⚫, then White's pair is removed from the board, leaving ⚫▁▁⚫.
A stone may legally be placed on any empty intersection, even if it forms a pair between two enemy stones. If the stones are placed ⚫⚪▁⚫, then White may place their stone so it becomes ⚫⚪⚪⚫. The pair is not captured in this case.
A player wins if they capture ten or more stones.
History ### Invention Gary Gabrel invented Pente while working as a dishwasher at Hideaway Pizza, in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Hoping to secure publisher backing, Gabrel sent his new ruleset to ten different companies but was rejected by all of them. Gabrel describes the experience of approaching prospective partners:
<blockquote>I went to the very few acquaintances I had, but they all rejected my propositions because they didn't understand the premise of the game, and they didn't have any respect for me as a prospective professional. and secured financing from Dr. Lee Centraccos and his wife, Cookie Centraccos, both of whom had previous experience in the restaurant industry and cable television, and agreed to give Gabrel cash and a $100,000 line of credit in return for twenty percent of the equity in Pente games, a share of the profit, and a position on the company's board of directors.
Sale to Parker Brothers On July 2, 1983, Gary Gabrel sold Pente to Parker Brothers for an undisclosed sum. He was adamant that the sale would be the best thing possible for Pente and had assurances from Parker Brothers that the gameplay would not change and that they would continue to fund tournaments and promote the game. The hope was that Pente would move from being a popular new game to the status of a "true classic".
Present Currently, Pente is a registered trademark of Hasbro for strategy-game equipment. While Hasbro ceased distribution of Pente in 1993, it later licensed the name to Winning Moves Games USA, a classic games publisher that resurrected the game in 2004. The 2004 version includes four extra stones, called power stones, that can be played in the Pente Plus version. and "assist the growth of Pente enjoyment." It organized in-person tournaments, held postal tournaments through the mail, kept an up-to-date list of player ratings, and released a quarterly newsletter discussing Pente news, problems, and games, among other things.
First player advantage Pente, much like Gomoku, is known to favor the first player. The Pro Tournament Rule, proposed by Tom Braunlich, was adopted for standard tournament play as an attempt to mitigate this advantage and bring the win ratio at high-level play closer to around fifty percent, as is roughly the case in casual play. Analysis of approximately seven hundred fifty thousand games played online at Pente.org bears this out, demonstrating a bias of about fifty-three percent across all games and skill levels.
Further analysis showed that when timeouts are excluded and games are filtered out if either player's rating is below 1800 Elo, the first player advantage (FPA) increases from about 53% to about 58%. When the results are filtered to exclude games where the players ratings are below 2000 and then 2200 the FPA increases again to 59% and then 60%, respectively.
Variants ### Gameplay #### Keryo Keryo-Pente was proposed in 1983 by World Pente Champion Rollie Tesh Keryo-Pente is similar to Pente, changing only the capture rules. As in Pente, if one places five or more stones in a row in any direction, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, that player wins the game. One may capture pairs like Pente, and in addition may capture three stones in a row by the same custodial capture method. If one captures fifteen or more stones, that player wins the game.
Rollie Tesh believed, in comparison to the first player advantage mitigation rules used by Renju and Gomoku, such as overlines and double restrictions, that Keryo Pente was a more interesting proposal. Keryo Pente mitigates the FPA by "giving the defender more tactical chances . . . the attacker has to be more careful in his play; in regular Pente, the attack often is too easy, as if the attack plays itself."
Ninuki-Renju Ninuki Renju is a predecessor to Pente and one of Gabrel's inspirations for Pente. The winner is the player either to make a perfect five in a row, or to capture five pairs of the opponent's stones. As in Pente, a pair of stones of the same color may be captured by the opponent with custodial capture (sandwiching a line of two stones lengthwise). It differs from Pente in black moving first and its use of a 15x15 board and rule restrictions on the first player, such as the rule of three and three or winning through overlines. The rule of three and three forbids the creation of two lines of three stones at the same time without an opponent's stone blocking on one side of either line. An overline refers to lines longer than five in a row. In Pente, this is counted as a win, while in Ninuki-Renju, it is not. Finally, Ninuki-Renju also allows the game to continue after a player has formed a row of five stones if their opponent can capture a pair across the line, the same as in Boat Pente. to reduce the advantage held by the first player.
- Swap**, also known as D-Pente, or DK-Pente if applied to Keryo Pente, is a tournament rule variant that replaces the Pro rule with a version of the [[pie-rule]]. It is a modified version of the opening rule proposed in the 1983 *Pente Newsletter* that attempts to mitigate first-player advantage more effectively than the Pro rule by allowing for a greater variety of openings. The first player places two white stones and two black stones anywhere on the board. The second player then chooses which color to play. Play proceeds from there as normal with white moving first again. The Swap opening rule is available for online play on Pente.org after being implemented at the suggestion of Pente player Don Banks.
- Swap2**, borrowed from professional Gomoku, is a modification of the Swap rule. It seeks to limit the tentative first player's ability to offer known (to them) Swap openings that may be unclear to the tentative second player seeing it for the first time.
The first player places three stones on the board, two white and one black. The second player then has these options: # Choose to play as white # Choose to play as black and place a second black stone # Place two more stones, one black and one white, and pass the choice of which color to play back to the first player. Because the tentative first player doesn't know where the tentative second player will place the additional stones if they take option 2 or 3, the swap2 opening protocol limits excessive studying of a line by only one of the players.
Strategy and tactics ### Initiative Initiative is a fundamental concept for winning Pente. Initiative is the ability to make a threat or move without having to respond to an opponent's play, while forcing them to respond to yours. A player with initiative essentially controls the state of the board and will eventually win if the other player isn't able to take it back and begin forming their own threats.
Basic shapes
Certain basic shapes are fundamental to skillful Pente play. The most important are stretch twos, open trias, stretch trias, and open tesseras.
;Pair A pair is a group of two stones directly adjacent. Pairs are the basis of Pente's capture rules and the only pattern in standard Pente susceptible to capture. Pairs are therefore very weak and vulnerable formations. Beginners are often told outright to simply avoid forming them in a game if they can due to their vulnerabilities. They can, however, be used to great advantage by intermediate and advanced players due to their ability to threaten to form open trias and their use in advanced tactics such as the wedge formation.
;Stretch two A stretch two is a pattern with stones placed near each other with an empty space in between. Stretch Twos are an important skill to learn for beginners. They offer two main benefits for a player. They can threaten to form a line of three stones, an open tria, if unbound on either side by enemy stones, and they stop the player from forming a pair. A pair is vulnerable to capture by the opponent and therefore a liability to player that formed it. If the opponent places a stone adjacent to either side of the pair the defending player must now either sacrifice the pair to capture and play elsewhere, create a threat in another location that cannot be ignored by the enemy, or to protect it by extending it immediately and lose initiative.
;Open tria An open tria is a line of three stones that are not bound on either side of the line by an opponent's stones. Open trias are powerful because they threaten to form an open tessera on the next turn if the opponent does not respond to block the tria. Open tesseras are the most powerful shape in Pente, short of the eponymous and winning "pente" pattern of five stones in a row. An open tria allows the player who placed it to create initiative for themselves because of how it forces the opponent to move to respond. The ability to form many open trias each turn forces the other player to respond and allows the placing player to form a powerful board presence with many options for attack, while the defending generally has to place stones in many locations all over the board that are disconnected and not immediately helpful for forming pentes and other powerful patterns.
;Stretch tria A stretch tria is a shape formed by a single stone placed in line with a pair of stones and a single empty space between them. The stretch tria is vulnerable to counter because an opponent can place a stone between the single stone and the pair and threaten capture. It is powerful, however, because it threatens to form a tessera, and if unbound on either side forces the opponent to respond in a similar way to open tria, creating initiative and allowing play elsewhere on the board without the opponent interfering. The stretch tria can be a very powerful tool when used in conjunction with other stretch trias. A vertical stretch tria with the pair at the top and the single stone at the bottom can be combined with another stretch tria in a diagonal or horizontal line so that both stretch trias share the same single stone. If an opponent tries to stop one of them, then the very next turn, the player who formed the stretch tria can extend the other and turn it into a tessera. If the tessera is unbound the position is likely a winning one.
; The I
The I shape is a stretch two unbound on either side and with the space to expand to an L shape in at least one of the applicable directions. The l shape, like the stretch two, protects your two stones from being captured as a pair, and has the ability to threaten to become an open tria or an L shape. It is the weakest of the "letter" shapes and is largely valuable for its potential rather than its strength as a pattern.