Checkers (Cont.)

Additional Checkers Strategies

In Checkers, the overall goal is to keep the balance of power in your favor, which means having more pieces than your opponent. Of course, having six badly positioned men while your opponent has four well-placed kings is not an advantageous situation. But on the whole if you can keep your piece count up, you will tend to win.



To get ahead in piece count, you will need to balance offense with defense. If you have a chance to get a king early in the game while keeping your opponent from doing the same, you will be in a good position to mop up several of his or her pieces. But charging out to try to obtain a king early is likely to result in failure, since a piece out front all by itself is likely to be captured.

A more reliable strategy for the beginner is to concentrate on defense, trying to avoid positions where you are forced to lose pieces. For the most part, this means keeping your pieces backed up.
Backing up your pieces means guarding their rear flanks. Look at Figure 1 to see how the front line of white pieces is protected by the pieces behind them. At the moment, the front pieces are invulnerable to the enemy.

To keep your pieces backed up you often have to move the back-up piece into place first, and then move the front line piece into position in front of it (since if you did it the other way around the front-line piece would be vulnerable for one turn).
Figure 1 also shows that white has moved only one piece from the back wall (the very back row of checkers). Keeping pieces on the back wall until you have a good reason to move them is a good defensive strategy since those pieces cannot be jumped where they stand.

By keeping your pieces safe, you can try to force your opponent into making a bad move; a move that results in you making a capture with your opponent unable to reciprocate.
If you can wear your opponent down in this way, you will be the first to get a king, and then you can go on an offensive attack.

-- More advanced strategies coming up next......

Checkers (Cont.)

Checkers Strategies and Tips

Try these strategies and tips to improve your Checkers game:

Don't start out with the sole idea of trading pieces as quickly as possible. Trade only when you can win a positional advantage (for example, trade pieces if it helps you open a path toward the King Row).

The weakest sector in your half of the board is the one with the "Double Corner" (the corner with two playing squares instead of one). This is also your opponent's weakest point. The first Kings are usually crowned here.

You'll command the board if you can place your pieces on the center squares (the two immediately in front of your lines and the two immediately in front of them).

Once you've occupied the center squares with your pieces, try to exchange in the direction of your opponent's Double Corner.

Consolidate your pieces as you advance. A wedge-shaped formation gives you the most security and the most punching power. As you advance each checker, follow it up with a checker from the line behind.

Attack as hard as you can when you see large gaps and straggling men in your opponent's position.
The best defense is almost always to try to force an exchange of men. This lessens the attacker's power.

Never keep all four men on your back row -- you'll find yourself outgunned everywhere else! Keep two men there, preferably one in the Double Corner and one two squares away.

Always ask yourself: "Where will I land if I jump?" and "Will that leave my opponent with an opening?"

Look closely. Sometimes by offering one man, you can capture two!

Don't move to the sides! A piece on the "rim" has had its reach cut in half. This is a typical beginner's error.

In the endgame, you must keep your checkers out of the reach of any enemy Kings, and you must push them through to the King Row.

Endgames are often won or lost by who has "the move"—in other words, by who moves LAST. Generally, the player moving last will win. If your opponent has "the move," you can take that advantage away from him or her by forcing a one-for-one exchange.

In the endgame, one King against one King is a draw (if one can take shelter in a Double Corner). Two Kings against one King is usually a win for the majority side, but three Kings against two Kings is often a draw -- provided the minority side can place one King in each Double Corner.

If you have two Kings against three Kings, avoid a one-for-one exchange—you have a good chance to draw with two against three, but not much chance at all with one against two!



-- More additional Checkers Strategies & Tips coming up next.

Checkers (Cont.)

How to Play Checkers

Checkers is played by two people on the same checkered board that is used for Chess, but there all similarities end. The pieces that make up your army are also called checkers (or simply men), and each army has 12 of them. The checkers of each army are the same color. Whichever colors are used, the side with the darker pieces is called Black and the side with the lighter pieces is called White.

The board is placed so that each player has a light-colored square in the corner on the right. The pieces move only on the dark-colored squares.
To begin a game, set your pieces up on the 12 dark squares of the first 3 rows of the board. Your opponent does the same.
By tradition, Black moves first. Moves alternate after that. You lose the game if your turn comes and you can't make any moves. This usually occurs because all of your pieces have been captured, but sometimes because the ones you have left have been immobilized by your opponent. If neither you nor your opponent has enough of an advantage to win, you can agree to a draw.

The pieces move one square at a time, always forward and always diagonally to an adjacent dark square. The exception to the one-square-at-a-time rule is when you are capturing, or jumping, an enemy piece. You can jump if your piece occupies a square adjacent to the enemy, and if there is an empty square on the other side of the enemy. That empty square is the one your piece will jump to. The enemy piece is then removed from the board. If, after capturing an enemy piece, you find yourself next to another enemy and the square beyond that one is empty, you can capture that second piece, too. And so on. You can change direction in these multiple captures, so long as you keep moving forward.


King Me

The row of squares farthest from each player is that player's King row. On reaching the King row, your piece is crowned and becomes a King. Now it can move backward as well as forward. (If by jumping over one or more of your enemies you land on the King row, your new King can't continue jumping in the same turn even if the opportunity is right there. The act of being crowned requires that the new King end its turn on the King row.)


-- Coming up next, "Checkers Strategies and Tips".

Checkers (Cont..)

Checkers in the Modern Era

Those of us who don't play in Checkers tournaments usually begin a game by just beginning. Whatever we like to play, we play. This style is called Go-As-You-Please, and on the professional level it results in numerous draws, due to the great knowledge these players bring to the game. The first world championship, held in 1847 (between two Scotsmen, of course), was a Go-As-You-Please affair. In the 1890s, the Two-Move Restriction was introduced, in which the first two moves of a game were chosen by lot from certain pre-approved combinations.

The Two-Move Restriction eliminated many draws, though not enough. The Three-Move Restriction was introduced at the 1934 world championship (between two Americans). The participants chose moves by lot from a list of officially sanctioned "three-move openings." This system is still used today (though there's also a separate tournament track for Go-As-You-Please games). A third system, in which one man from each army is removed by lot before the first move, is less popular.

An Odd Sociological Footnote

We all know the stereotype of Chess masters: they eventually go insane. Checkers masters keep their marbles, so to speak, but they seem to die tragically. Some examples:
The first American world champion, Robert Yates, took the crown from the Scots in 1874. He died not long after in an accident at sea. He was 24.
The 1902 world champion, Scotland's Richard Jordan, was killed in a train accident.
In 1927, the United States walloped Great Britain in the Second International Checkers Match (Great Britain had done the same to the US in the first match, played in 1905). Sam Gonotsky, top scorer for the US team, died a few years later. He was in his twenties.

In 1949, Willie Ryan tied defending champ Walter Hellman (both Americans). Ryan wasn't particularly young at the time, but he died not long after, just weeks before he was scheduled to play Hellman in a rematch.
In 1951, Hellman defeated Maurice Chamblee (American) in a title match. Chamblee soon died, of course. He was in his twenties.

-- Enough for stories of Checkers. ---

Coming up next, "How to play Checkers?".

Checkers (Cont...)

Here are more interesting stories about Checkers.

The Word Checkers Enters the Language

The name Draughts never caught on in several rural, out-of-the-way pockets of England. People there referred to the game as Checkers, after the checkered board on which the game was played. Many of the Pilgrims who set up shop in Massachusetts in the 1600s came from those areas where Draughts was known as Checkers. They not only brought the game with them when they came over on the Mayflower, they brought the name, too. Checkers spread outward from Massachusetts (many New England Indian tribes adopted the game), and wherever English was spoken, Checkers was the name.

Checkers Catches On (Slowly)

The indefatigable H.J.R. Murray dug deep into medieval European literature to document the spread of Checkers. In his History of Board Games Other Than Chess, he reports finding only five mentions of the game in the years 1200 to 1500. Four are French; one is English. (The English reference is from a poem by Chaucer, who cleverly plays up the confusion that might result in conversation if one person is talking about Chess and the other Checkers and neither knows it.)

In this period too the Church was busy banning every new game that popped up in Christendom, including Chess and almost all card and dice games. But Murray could find no such injunction leveled against Checkers. "It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the game cannot have been very widely known before 1500," he writes—certainly not outside of France, England, and perhaps Spain.
Something happened to Checkers in those years leading up to the 16th century, something that made the game much more attractive. Up until then, there were two ways to play Checkers: a) you could choose not to capture an enemy piece when the opportunity came, or b) you were compelled to capture. Compulsory captures is what makes Checkers so interesting, and by the opening of the 16th century this form of play was dominant. (Odd rules from various corners of Europe, such as checkermen not being allowed to capture Kings, had also been ditched.) Checkers then spread eastward, first into Italy (where we have a report dated 1527) and elsewhere in Europe after 1550.

The Scots Take Center-Stage

The first work in English to focus on Checkers in a serious manner appeared in 1756 (William Payne's Introduction to the Game of Draughts). From here the Scots took over the game, and, in the following hundred years, greatly expanded our knowledge of its possibilities. The Scottish influence is still seen in the names of some of the more popular opening systems, which bear the names of Scottish towns (Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow) and more fanciful notions (the Will-o-the-Wisp, the Laird & Lady, and the Ayrshire Lassie).

Given the stormy relations between England and Scotland in the years leading up to their unification, it's believed that the Scots learned the game of Checkers not from the hated English but from the Dutch (in whose armies many Scots fought in the 17th century). The Scottish Dam is certainly closer to the Dutch Damen and the French Dames than the English Draughts.

Next: Coming up next "Checkers in the Modern Era".

Checkers

There are many interesting stories about Checkers.

Background

Checkers has always suffered from a bit of an image problem. It's a medieval offspring of Chess, and it had to grow up in the shadow of its parent, which was at the time wildly popular. And it took several centuries to find the right balance in the rules. Many people look upon Checkers as that game you play until you're ready to learn Chess, but this attitude is mistaken. Checkers is a game with its own depths and complexities. A supercomputer brought down the human champion in Chess (IBM's Deep Blue, 1997); it took a supercomputer just to earn a tie with the human champion in Checkers (the University of Alberta's Chinook, 1994).

The French Mix and Match

Checkers is almost certainly a French invention of about the 12th century. It's a mixture of an old Moorish game, Alquerque (pronounced like the city of Albuquerque, minus the third and fourth letters), and Chess. Alquerque is the Spanish corruption of the Arabic el-quirkat. The game was first mentioned in print in a Moorish book published in the 10th century, but its history goes much farther back. One of the ancient temples of Egypt has an Alquerque board engraved in its roof. (Since we know the ancient Egyptians didn't float in midair, we can assume that this board was meant as a decoration. The Egyptians must have loved their games to have used them in this fashion.)

Alquerque gave Checkers the 12-man army and the capture-by-jumping concept. Alquerque is played on a latticed board, but the pieces occupy the intersections of the lines rather than the insides of the squares formed by the lines.
Chess provided the concept of the checkered board (a European innovation). When the French combined Chess and Alquerque, the Alquerque men moved off the intersections and occupied the Chess squares. Now all the new game needed was a name. Surprisingly, that too came from Chess.

When Chess came to Europe, it had no queen; instead, a piece called the fers (a Persian word meaning "counselor") stood beside the King. Because the pieces in Checkers moved like the Fers in Chess, the game was called Ferses, and the pieces, rather than the 12 flat disks we're familiar with, were 12 Ferses pilfered from Chess sets.By the year 1500, the Europeans had replaced the Fers in Chess with the queen—in French, the dame. The queen also knocked the Fers off the checkerboard. (So now the French were using 12 queens per army—and when a queen reached the last rank, it underwent a sex change and became a King. Interesting.) For the next 200 years the French referred to Checkers as Dames, a name that followed the game as it spread across the continent, from Turkey (Dama) to Scotland (where it is still referred to as Dams). In England, however, the game was called Draughts (pronounced Drafts), a Middle English word referring to a move made by the queen in Chess. Draughts is the name the English have continued to use; the pieces are the draughtsmen and the board is the draughtsboard.

Next: More interesting stories about Checkers..... how the word Checkers enters the language?

Reversi (Cont.)

Advanced Strategies for Reversi (Cont.)

The third strategy, mobility, is more difficult to illustrate. It is also counterintuitive. Looking at Figure 4, your first inclination might be to say that Black is firmly in control. In fact, White is in control; Black is currently immobilized, while White has options for taking pieces on every side.

Remember that players are only allowed to make moves that cause one or more pieces to be flipped. By limiting your opponent's choice of such moves, you gain control because you get to choose how the board is developed.
However, it is not easy to achieve a board position where you dominate your opponent in terms of mobility. To do so, you must sacrifice pieces and try to capture central positions instead of pieces along the frontier of play. Figure 5 illustrates this concept. White has too much frontier space, and Black is in control.

The trick to controlling mobility is to constantly look at the board from your opponent's point of view. What moves can you make that will leave your opponent with the fewest available moves?

--- That's all for Reversi ---

Next: Coming up next will be Checker and Backgammon.

Reversi (Cont..)

Advanced Strategies for Reversi

An example of playing for key squares is shown in Figure 2. Here, Black has taken two edge squares along the top of the board and is in good position. Black can now also take the edge square at b1 (indicated by a question mark). However, doing so would be a costly mistake; it would jeopardize all of Black's key positions (b1, d1, and e1). If Black takes b1, white will move into c1, subsequently gain control of the corner, and wipe out all of Black's edge positions (Figure 3 shows the end result). Black must do something else instead; just about anything else would be a better move.

Next: More strategies and tips coming up.

Reversi (Cont.)

Reversi Strategies and Tips

Most players of Reversi use one of three common strategies, depending on their level of experience. These are:

1. Capture as many squares as you can each turn.
2. Concentrate on capturing stable squares.
3. Attempt to maximize your mobility (your play options) while limiting the mobility of your opponent.

The first of these three strategies is simple: on each turn choose the move that flips as many of your opponent's pieces as possible. This strategy works in certain cases, but you will often find that gained territory is soon lost when your opponent flips the pieces back. It's true that you want as many pieces as possible to show your color at the end of the game. But you will find that haphazardly going for big flips in the early game won't achieve this goal.

The second strategy, capturing stable squares, is more complex. The main idea here is that some squares are more stable, and hence more valuable, than others because they are harder for your opponent to recapture. Corners are the most stable, since they can never be recaptured. Squares along the edge of the board are fairly stable also, since they can only be captured by other pieces on the edge. Other squares on the board are much more unstable and vulnerable.

Take a look at Figure on the right corner above (Types of Squares on the Reversi Board). Key squares in Reversi have standardized letter designations: A, B, C, and X. All the edge squares are considered valuable (C is better than B; B is better than the A) because they are relatively stable. The corners are not marked because they are obviously valuable.

The X squares are generally dangerous plays because they almost always allow your opponent, sooner or later, to take the adjacent corner. Late in the game, or when the corner has already been filled, you may find an X square to be your best play. But before then, you should almost always look for another move.


Next: Some more advanced strategies.

Reversi (Cont..)

How to Play Reversi

Players take turns placing pieces on the board, with black playing first. You can only play a square that causes one or more of your opponent's pieces to become sandwiched between your pieces, and thus flipped. Only sandwiches formed by newly placed pieces count; sandwiches that result from stones being flipped do not themselves cause other stones to be flipped.

The game continues until all squares on the board are filled.

The player with the most pieces showing his or her color at the end of the game is the winner.

Next: Some Reversi Strategies and Tips

Reversi

Background

In an unlikely coincidence, two very similar games were marketed in the city of London in 1880. One game, invented by John W. Mollett, was called Annexation, and was played on a board shaped like a cross. The other game, invented by Lewis Waterman, was Reversi. Reversi used the same 8 x 8 square board as Checkers. Which of the two games actually hit the marketplace first is unknown, but Waterman's Reversi survived. This may have been due in part to the fact that Jacques and Sons, Waterman's firm, legitimized the game by publishing The Handbook of Reversi in 1888.

Reversi is similar to, though more accessible than, the ancient Asian game of Go. Besides their visual similarity, both games share a theme of controlling territory by surrounding the opponent's pieces in order to reverse them (in Reversi), or capture them (in Go). It seems likely that Waterman and/or Mollett were inspired by Go in the invention of their games.

Next: How to play Reversi?

Chinese Checker (Cont..)

Strategies and Tips - 2

Other patterns work equally well or even better. The Diamond and Triangular Chains shows the player on the bottom using a diamond-shaped pattern. It also shows the player on the top moving down in a triangular pattern.

Defense in Chinese Checkers is optional. One defensive strategy is to place your marble in another player's home base. You can maintain this block longer if you place your marble in a home base adjacent to your destination base. If you're behind, this may help you to catch up. Conversely, if others have played this nasty trick on you, make sure their marbles can leave by giving them a way to jump out. (They can't resist a double jump!)

Another way to stop your opponent from advancing is to create a diamond-shaped block composed of four marbles. When the block ends, use the diamond to advance your marbles.

The construction of marble chains is key in games with two to three players. Different circumstances may call for different types of chains. If your opponent is leaving you alone, construct chains that will allow you to make longer leaps.In the six-player game, the board gets jammed up, and soon you will be forced to abandon subtlety in favor of a more obvious strategy: look for opportunities to jump your opponents. Remember to look backwards. Sometimes, a long forward jump can be achieved in a roundabout way.

---- That's all for Chinese Checkers ----


Next: I planned to blog about Checkers (the real Checkers) for my next post, but since some bloggers mentioned about the Reversi, I will go for the Resersi first.

Chinese Checkers (Cont.)

Strategies and Tips

Where can you seek the best methodology for playing Chinese Checkers? The Code of Hammurabi? The Bhagavad-Gita? Your best bet is the nearest playground; leapfrog has much to teach the would-be victor of this racing game. While bounding over several of your opponents' pieces looks impressive, it can leave a marble out in no-man's land, with nowhere to go next. It is better to construct your own marble chains, taking turns leapfrogging over your own pieces.

One way to do this is by using zig-zag patterns as you cross the board. For an example of this, see the picture of the Zig-Zag Chain. The player with the darker marbles is moving with a zig-zag up through the middle. The piece at the back of the zig-zag can advance two jumps in this example. The only drawback of the zig-zag is that it is easily halted by your opponent.

Next Tips: The Diamond and Triangular Chains

Chinese Checkers (Cont.)

How to Play Chinese Checkers

The goal in Chinese Checkers is to be the first to move all of your marbles into the point (triangular area) opposite your home base. Two, three, four, or six people can play, but never five (because one player wouldn't have an opponent opposite him or her).

Two people set up exactly opposite each other. Three people alternate every other point. Four people set up opposite again.

Each player starts with a set of 10 marbles set up in the 10 holes or indentations of his home base. Play passes clockwise around the board. You can move one marble on your turn. You can move to any adjacent hole, forward, backward, diagonally, or sideways.

If the square next to your marble is occupied by your enemy or by one of your own pieces, but the square on the other side is vacant, you can jump to that vacant square. A marble can make multiple jumps in the same turn.

Next: Some strategies and tips for Chinese Checkers.

Chinese Checkers

Background

Chinese Checkers owns the oddest name: It wasn't invented in China, and it has nothing to do with Checkers!

Everyone agrees that this game first appeared in the late 1800s and that it first became popular in Sweden. This inventor simply took the Greek game of Halma (meaning jump or leap) and changed its look. Halma is played on a square board, Chinese Checkers is played on a board shaped like a six-pointed star. Halma uses flat pieces moving from square to square, Chinese Checkers uses marbles moving from hole to hole. In both games, the object is to be the first to occupy an enemy camp with your own pieces.

Although the marbles in Chinese Checkers move by jumping or leaping another marble, as in Checkers, this doesn't mean the two games are related. In Checkers, the jump is part of the business of capturing; Checkers is a war game, and the piece jumped is removed from play. In Chinese Checkers, the jump is just one way of getting around the board; Chinese Checkers is a racing game, and the piece jumped stays where it is.

By the way: Chinese Checkers is indeed played in China. In China, they use 10 marbles per player, which is the form also used in the United States, as opposed to the 15 sometimes used in Europe.

Next: How to play Chinese Checkers

Master Match (Cont.)

Master Match Strategies and Tips

Try these strategies and tips to improve your Master Match game:

1. Be sure that each guess you make is consistent with all the results you've had in the past. If your first guess tells you that three colors are right, keep three colors in the next guess. If your first guess tells you that one peg is in the right position, keep one peg (and only one) in one of those positions for future guesses.
2. If one color is eluding you, try placing multiple pegs of that color in your guess. Placing four red pegs in a row will tell you definitively whether red is in your puzzle. This may also be a useful strategy for the beginning of the game.

Note: That's all for Master Match.... what coming next???

Master Match (Cont..)

Playing Master Match

1. Make a guess on a puzzle made for you by the other player, and place pegs on the board.
2. For your first guess, use the bottom row.
3. For each subsequent guess, move up one row.
4. You must place a peg in each hole.
5. When you've made your guess, the other player will tells you how many pegs are with the correct color and in the correct place, and how many pegs are with the correct color, but are not in the correct place.
6. Continue guessing until you guess the code or run out of guesses (you run out when you fill every row on the Master Match board).
7. If you're playing the two-board version, the game also ends if the other player guesses your code.

Next: Few Master Match Strategies and Tips

Master Match (Cont.)

Master Match Guess Example

In the example above, your first guess (on the bottom row) gives a match result of 1/2. This tells you that one peg is the correct color and is in the correct place, and two pegs are the correct color, but are not in the correct place.

For your second guess, the match result of 0/2 tells you that two of the pegs are the correct color, but none of the pegs are in the correct place.

You learn at least two things from the combination of these two results:
1. Although you used three of the same colors of pegs in your first and second guess, in your second guess, only two pegs were the correct color (three were correct in the first guess). So you know that yellow (the only color you omitted) is definitely in the puzzle, and the new color, purple, is definitely not in the puzzle.
2. Although you left white in the same place in each guess, the result for Correct Place & Color changed from 1 to 0 (nothing), so you know that white is definitely not in the correct place.

For your next guess, you should add a yellow peg to your guess, and you might want to try guessing white in a different place. Note that although you know yellow is in the puzzle, you don't know which of the other colors in your first guess is correct or incorrect.

Normally, each peg in the secret code is a different color; for a more challenging game, you can use two or more pegs of the same color.

Note: To be continue......

Master Match (Cont.)

How to Play Master Match

You can play Master Match with one or two boards. In the standard two-board version, there are two Master Match boards, and each player makes a code for the other player to guess. Then, you and the other player simultaneously try to guess each others' codes.

In the one-board version, you play with one Master Match board. One player makes a code by combining different colored pegs, and the other player tries to guess the code in as few tries as possible.

To play, one player secretly places a number of pegs at the top of the board; those pegs are then hidden. The other player then makes a guess by placing pegs on the Master Match board. The results of the guess are then shown. The blue Correct Place & Color result tells you how many pegs are the correct color and are in the correct place, whereas the white Correct Color result tells you how many pegs are the correct color but are not in the correct place. This information helps you make an educated guess at the code in future turns.

Note: To be continue.............

Master Match

Background
Code-breaking games like Master Match have been popular for quite some time. Requiring little more than a piece of paper and a logical mind, these puzzles are favorites of mathematicians, physicists, cryptographers and other lovers of logic, but are easy enough for anyone to understand and can help teach valuable analytical skills.

In Master Match, one player creates a puzzle, and the other player tries to guess it as quickly as possible, by analyzing the results given by the code creator as to accuracy and position.
The original concept for Master Match comes from Jotto, a game that's been around for hundreds of years. In Jotto, a player creates a word for another player to guess. Code breaking games have been made with colors, numbers, and letters. Games using colors are popular as it can be easier to visualize patterns.

Next: How to play Master Match

Mahjong Tiles (cont.)

Mahjong Tiles Strategy

Try these hints and tips to improve your Mahjong Tiles game:

Mahjong Tiles is like an overstuffed version of Solitaire; the board needs trimming down fast, and it's your job to do it. In comparing Mahjong Tiles and Solitaire, you'll find that the rules are very different (matching pairs versus combining suits and ranks), but the strategy is quite similar.

The playing field in Mahjong Tiles is a puzzle that must be unlocked. Look to see what tiles will unlock other tiles. As in Solitaire, you have no guarantees that the puzzle is solvable at all (a needed "key" may be out of reach behind or beneath a tile). You can, however, postpone or completely avoid the typical dead end (where you have no plays left) by making the best play when you have several choices available.

The crucial element that makes Mahjong Tiles more skillful than Solitaire is that you can see most of the tiles. In standard card Solitaire, most of the cards are hidden beneath stacks one to seven cards deep. If you need a specific card, you have to get lucky to pick the right stack. With Mahjong Tiles, on the other hand, you can spend as much time as you want looking for the very best move. So the big question is, do you have the time?

ENJOY A GAME OF MAHJONG TILES, AND YOU WILL BE ADDICTED!!!