It seams that a lot of peoples use jtwixt. I don't have to much time so I like to play more games instead of using it. The result is that I am oscillating a lot with my rank. I admit that I used twixt too during the 4th championship after I beat Pit and I saw that I have a chance to co-win the championship.

My question is: isn't jtwixt a tool that slow down your own thinking? When I was in Hamburg and played two games with tehnolion I was already handicapped by the missing of green lines. How I would be if I use jtwixt a lot then play live without it?

I guess there are two schools of thought about this. If you train yourself to see ahead without making experimental moves on the board, you will likely do better in a face-to-face encounter. But Jtwixt can help you notice things you might not have otherwise seen. If you find a new tactic using Jtwixt, you will remember it better than if someone merely tells you about it. Perhaps the key lies in moderation.

I also had some difficulty coping without the guide lines in my MSO games, but since my opponent was using the same board, I didn't regard it as a significant problem. There's a trick you can do, to move your eye along the board one knight's move at a time. Or, stand up and eyeball the line like a billiards player eyeing a shot. There's nothing in the rules that says you can't do that. Bharat chose to stand up for all of his games, which probably does give you a better perspective. You can always remove the guide lines from your JTwixt display if you prefer. Perhaps a better long-term solution would be for boards with guide lines on them to be adopted as the standard.

What's the 2nd school of thought about this? Did I miss the dividing line between the 1st school and the 2nd, or did David's jet lag erase the 2nd school?

My own thought about it is that it trains me to visualize. I used to have trouble with that - did I imagine a link there, or not? And since I am such a careful player, I used to write notes in a text editor, make drawings on graph paper, and put little bits of colored paper in my physical twixt board. Then David told me about Jtwixt.

Jtwixt doesn't help much in the opening moves, and any other time when there are too many possibilities to consider. Then you have to rely on rules of thumb, intuition, and proofs.

Recently, I find that I usually end up playing the first move I thought of, even if I then use Jtwixt to boost my confidence. Much of getting good at Twixt involves seeing the one or two best moves right away. The quicker you can sort out the best moves, the smaller the combinatorial explosion you're facing. In other words, if you're seeing 3 or 4 possible moves per turn, and your opponent's seeing 1 or 2, and you're both trying to look 5 or 6 moves ahead, Jtwixt cannot help you much. Your finger will get tired from clicking the mouse.

Well, the first school of thought is “don't use Jtwixt, Jtwixt BAD” and the 2nd school is “Use Jtwixt, Jtwixt GOOD.” I usually don't use Jtwixt during an LG game, even against Klaus, but sometimes I feel like I need to try to nail down the tactics in a crucial spot. After a game is perhaps the best time to use it, to see what you did right and what you did wrong.

OK I'll bite: Please let me know – What's Jtwixt?

Jtwixt is a Java virtual board and game database manager for Twixt. You can examine and store games along with an entire branching tree of variations, not just the moves of the game. Jtwixt does not play the game, but you can use it to study games that are ongoing, or games that are completed. It has lots of nice features. You can download it here. You need a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in order to run this jar file. You can download a JRE from Sun here. I would be happy to try to help, if you have any questions or difficulty getting all this to work. My email is twixt@cstone.net