To all -

HA HA HA!! Mark (mmammel) initially fooled me BIG time and I wrote him an Email asking about some of the particulars. But then right after I sent him the Email I realized just what Pioneer54 probably took less than a minute to realize. That is that 'slooF lirpA' in Mark's message is 'April Fools' spelled backwards. I had assumed that Mark had put his fingers on the wrong keys and accidently typed some nonsense.

He had me hook, line, and sinker and shaking my head for more than two hours! So I wanted to see how many others that 'we' could fool by perpectuating it.

I'm glad to see that Walter shares my viewpoint on this. I would be strongly against something like that. The unusual board size wouldn't bother me as long as the opening restriction was imposed on player 1. But the particulars of how the lesser player would be able to extend into the 'forbidden area' of the stronger player could be quite complicated to program and I think that Filip's time could be FAR better spent on improving the site in other ways. Also, there are MUCH better Pente variants that could be designed, regardless of the board size or the ability difference of the players.

Good one Mark!

One thing that I should say about Mark. He is an excellent Pente player and has his own website of which a large portion is dedicated to Pente. On the site, he has free downloads of a very good Pente-playing program, an opening book, a small database, and past Pente champions of various world-class tournaments as well as information about a few other games. I don't remember the name of his site, but you can go to a real-time Pente site at www.pente.org and there will be a link to it at the bottom-left of the home page. You could probably also message him here and he will give you the site address.

To ALL players - If you want to play some real-time Pente or Keryo Pente with ratings and the such with a lot of fun people, check out www.pente.org. Of course it will be on a 19x19 with the opening restriction. :-)


Gary