A comprehensive and unique volume by the master of combinatorial game theory.

Traditional game theory has been successful at developing strategy in games of incomplete information: when one player knows something that the other does not. But it has little to say about games of complete information, for example tic-tac-toe, solitaire and hex. This is the subject of combinatorial game theory. Most board games are a challenge for mathematics: to analyze a position one has to examine the available options, and then the further options available after selecting any option, and so on. This leads to combinatorial chaos, where brute force study is impractical. In this comprehensive volume, Jozsef Beck shows readers how to escape from the combinatorial chaos via the fake probabilistic method, a game-theoretic adaptation of the probabilistic method in combinatorics. Using this, the author is able to determine exact results about infinite classes of many games, leading to the discovery of some striking new duality principles.

Preface
A summary of the book in a nutshell
Part A. Weak Win and Strong Draw: 1. Win vs. weak win
2. The main result: exact solutions for infinite classes of games
Part B. Basic Potential Technique - Game-Theoretic First and Second Moments: 3. Simple applications
4. Games and randomness
Part C. Advanced Weak Win - Game-theoretic Higher Moment: 5. Self-improving potentials
6. What is the biased meta-conjecture, and why is it so difficult?
Part D. Advanced Strong Draw - Game-theoretic Independence: 7. BigGame-SmallGame decomposition
8. Advanced decomposition
9. Game-theoretic lattice-numbers
10. Conclusion
Complete list of open problems
What kind of games? A dictionary
Dictionary of the phrases and concepts
Appendix A. Ramsey numbers
Appendix B. Hales-Jewett theorem: Shelah's proof
Appendix C. A formal treatment of positional games
Appendix D. An informal introduction to game theory
References.