Pattern Recognition in Mancala

Video Transcript

" Hello! My name is Melissa Schenk and on behalf of expertvillage.com, today we’ve been discussing strategy techniques for playing the game Mancala. Now, our last strategy technique we call pattern recognition. We’re going to put all of these strategy techniques together, and of course over time, players tend to recognize all of these different patterns. So if we take a look at the board once again here, you’ll see we’ll put all of these strategies together and we’ll notice quite a few patterns when looking at this board. For instance, you, the opponent, in bin L have a lot, well a large concentration in your bin L. That’s going to alert myself that I want to try and steal these. Now, the first thing I’m going to have to do is try and empty these out because really in order to do that, I’m probably going to have to do a looping strategy to come around the board and to steal these stones. If I take the stones out of A and sow them into B, C, D, E, F, my last stone ends up in M, so therefore, I would get another turn. Now, if you count this out properly, you’ll know that I’m probably going to have to use F to do a looping strategy to come around to L or into A so that I can steal these. I know that by counting that out, I’m going to need 8 stones. So far, I have 4 stones, so if I take I get another turn remember here. I’m going to take the stones out of C and go 1, 2, 3, 4. Well, now I’m up to 5 and I get another turn. Let’s see here if we go into D, E, F, M, and G. So far, I’m not quite there yet; I’m up to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 stones, but in another few moves, I’ll know that I can get around and do a looping strategy. So with pattern recognition, what you’re trying to do is to recognize the pattern, recognize all the strategies that we’ve discussed when playing your Mancala. So have fun and enjoy playing your game. "