Ultimate Frisbee, Chess, and the Horizontal Stack
After finishing a Summer League game the other night, I was walking to the car thinking a little bit more about the comparisons I was trying to draw between soccer, basketball, and chess, in particular the importance of establishing space in the middle of the field or in the middle of the board. I felt like the issue of space had come up again during the course of our game that night, and since I know ultimate frisbee as more of a player than I know soccer, this is what I've been working with.
One of the issues our team had that night was whether to play a horizontal or vertical stack. That debate seems to be an old one in ultimate frisbee (though for a recent well-written account, see here), with some people swearing by the vertical stack as a stable system with very defined roles. The horizontal stack, depending on who you talk to or what you read, is flashy, fluid, disorganized, or the wave of the future. For my own part, I don't have much of a preference. As someone who's never played too far off the ground, vertical stacks have often given me very discrete roles within the office, which I feel like have often fit my skill set, especially at the competitive college level. That said, I've also played ho stack, and have really enjoyed the space one has to work across the whole field.
In any event, to rehash a couple of the arguments I was making in that earlier piece on chess and soccer, there are five general types of pawn openings in a chess game: open, closed, fixed, dynamic, and mobile. The two most pertinent, I think, are the open and the fixed. In the first, the pawns in the d- and e-files have been exchanged, resulting in a faster-paced game in which the king is vulnerable to attacks from all sides. In the second game, the pawns' placement along the two central files has blocked most - if not all - attacks through the center of the board, shifting most of the action to the flanks. Strangely, because the main axis of play on the ultimate field is end-to-end, pairs of opposing players (say, the player with the disc and the marker) begin to function in a similar way to pawns on the chessboard. Furthermore, because picks aren't allowed on the ultimate field, every player really does end up functioning as a kind of pawn (some more than others, perhaps).
To my mind, that seems fairly close to the respective ways in which the horizontal and vertical stack systems operate. That said, how does that then affect the play of the game? Perhaps more importantly, how does that relate to pre-game strategy and preparation?
With those questions in mind, it might be helpful to turn to another chess concept - that of timing. To be honest, I've got only a rough grasp of how timing works in chess, but the quick version of it: The faster you can develop your pieces, the more advantages you'll have; further, moving in such a way as to preserve your tempo is preferable to moving in such a way that you're forced to give up tempo or (even worse) cede the initiative to the other player. Interestingly, it's a concept which seems to translate well into ultimate, especially given the growing attention paid to qualities of speed and athleticism. It's customary for the pulling team to talk about sprinting down to cover pulls; in a similar way, elite teams are often lauded for how quickly they get into their offensive sets. The issue, then, is one of timing and tempo. The team that's able to establish its tempo has an immediate advantage. On defense, this might be effected by fast stall counts, aggressively poaching throwing lanes to cut off first options, and making sure to establish a consistent mark. On offense, tempo might be preserved by moving the disc quickly, being comfortable throwing to second and third options, and breaking the mark consistently.
Extending the comparison with chess, the mark emerges as an essential part of controlling the space of the field. Against a vertical stack, forcing to one sideline seems to be the way that most people learn to play ultimate, but I'm not sure it's the best way for the defense to establish their own tempo. If the vertical stack is closest to the fixed pawn structure explained above, then it doesn't make sense to let the offense control the flanks. Whether or not it's a result of learning the play ultimate in North Carolina, force middle seems to be the defense's best option for forcing the disc away from open space (either sideline) and back into the cluster of the stack in the middle of the field. If a team is going to use the vertical stack as its primary offensive set, it's incumbent to really understand how and when to switch fields. If the offense is simply content to run cuts up the open (force) side of the field, they're risking one sloppy cut erasing whatever space they'd been able to establish on one sideline.
A horizontal stack system on the other hand, seems to allow a much larger range of movement. Because the vertical stack has been shifted, rotated, or otherwise removed from immediately in front of the thrower, it becomes a lot easier to through both through and to space. However, my brief experience with playing in ho stack systems has showed that they're far more difficult in practice than they are in the theory. Part of the issue, I think, may come back to the twin issues of timing and space. Timing becomes paramount: If the cutters are following one after the other without enough space, the center of the field becomes a sudden mess of bodies, poaching defenders, and frustrated offensive teams. In other words, once timing is lost, spacing collapses with it. Without proper spacing, the first cut becomes the only available cut for the handlers, and teams that can't establish their primary cut find themselves turning the disc over time and time again. While some teams seem to compensate for this by having their best couple of players move constantly around the disc, that strategy seems to run counter to the second aspect of timing: that of developing all the players (or pieces) on the field. In other words, once the defending team figures out how to frustrate the timing and spacing (read: the cuts) of the offense's top players, the rest of the team is out of position to make a play.
On defense, teams have two main options against a ho stack (short of playing zone). The first is to force straight up and try to keep all the cuts coming under. That's the way that my college team played a lot, and it worked against teams that weren't patient enough to reset the disc at high stall counts, instead trying to find deep cuts that ended up tailing out of bounds. On the other hand, it seems like a straight up mark is vulnerable to teams that really understand the value of moving the disc horizontally, rather than seeing the ho stack as an opportunity to jack the disc deep at every opportunity. Forcing middle doesn't seem a viable option because the vertical stack is no longer there and seems to give away too much of the field to the thrower. That leaves a hard sideline force. Admittedly, it's a difficult task if the offense is willing to put the effort in to break the mark, but if the defense is able to pin the offense on one side of the field, they've taken away the tempo and the initiative of the offense.
Chess games are customarily divided into openings, the middle game, and the end game. If the pull and the defense's covering of that pull is the opening, then it becomes paramount for both sides to try to establish the type of game that they want to play. If the offense does want to dictate a horizontal stack, they have to sprint into that set and establish their space from the very outset. Otherwise, they might find themselves (as my summer league team did a handful of times) losing the spacing and the cuts they were hoping to find. From the defense's perspective, establishing the mark becomes the way in which they try to dictate the direction of play. If the defense is able to establish their tempo from the pull, they're at a decided advantage.
In the end, there isn't anything really novel here: cover the pull, clear out hard, the countless other ultimate platitudes that get called out from the sideline. At the same time, I feel like space and spacing might be too little talked about when teaching ultimate. Get stronger, faster, jump higher, learn to throw the disc from end zone to end zone. Though I might be a textbook example of a player who thought about space a whole bunch without the athletic commitment to put it all into practice, I wonder at the same time about players blessed with athletic talent and dedication who have not a clue about spacing on the ultimate field. Beyond that, every so often there's a flurry of activity on RSD about ultimate versus some other sport. In some small way, this might be a way of suggesting new ways of thinking about the relationship of ultimate frisbee to other sports (and even games).
One of the issues our team had that night was whether to play a horizontal or vertical stack. That debate seems to be an old one in ultimate frisbee (though for a recent well-written account, see here), with some people swearing by the vertical stack as a stable system with very defined roles. The horizontal stack, depending on who you talk to or what you read, is flashy, fluid, disorganized, or the wave of the future. For my own part, I don't have much of a preference. As someone who's never played too far off the ground, vertical stacks have often given me very discrete roles within the office, which I feel like have often fit my skill set, especially at the competitive college level. That said, I've also played ho stack, and have really enjoyed the space one has to work across the whole field.
In any event, to rehash a couple of the arguments I was making in that earlier piece on chess and soccer, there are five general types of pawn openings in a chess game: open, closed, fixed, dynamic, and mobile. The two most pertinent, I think, are the open and the fixed. In the first, the pawns in the d- and e-files have been exchanged, resulting in a faster-paced game in which the king is vulnerable to attacks from all sides. In the second game, the pawns' placement along the two central files has blocked most - if not all - attacks through the center of the board, shifting most of the action to the flanks. Strangely, because the main axis of play on the ultimate field is end-to-end, pairs of opposing players (say, the player with the disc and the marker) begin to function in a similar way to pawns on the chessboard. Furthermore, because picks aren't allowed on the ultimate field, every player really does end up functioning as a kind of pawn (some more than others, perhaps).
To my mind, that seems fairly close to the respective ways in which the horizontal and vertical stack systems operate. That said, how does that then affect the play of the game? Perhaps more importantly, how does that relate to pre-game strategy and preparation?
With those questions in mind, it might be helpful to turn to another chess concept - that of timing. To be honest, I've got only a rough grasp of how timing works in chess, but the quick version of it: The faster you can develop your pieces, the more advantages you'll have; further, moving in such a way as to preserve your tempo is preferable to moving in such a way that you're forced to give up tempo or (even worse) cede the initiative to the other player. Interestingly, it's a concept which seems to translate well into ultimate, especially given the growing attention paid to qualities of speed and athleticism. It's customary for the pulling team to talk about sprinting down to cover pulls; in a similar way, elite teams are often lauded for how quickly they get into their offensive sets. The issue, then, is one of timing and tempo. The team that's able to establish its tempo has an immediate advantage. On defense, this might be effected by fast stall counts, aggressively poaching throwing lanes to cut off first options, and making sure to establish a consistent mark. On offense, tempo might be preserved by moving the disc quickly, being comfortable throwing to second and third options, and breaking the mark consistently.
Extending the comparison with chess, the mark emerges as an essential part of controlling the space of the field. Against a vertical stack, forcing to one sideline seems to be the way that most people learn to play ultimate, but I'm not sure it's the best way for the defense to establish their own tempo. If the vertical stack is closest to the fixed pawn structure explained above, then it doesn't make sense to let the offense control the flanks. Whether or not it's a result of learning the play ultimate in North Carolina, force middle seems to be the defense's best option for forcing the disc away from open space (either sideline) and back into the cluster of the stack in the middle of the field. If a team is going to use the vertical stack as its primary offensive set, it's incumbent to really understand how and when to switch fields. If the offense is simply content to run cuts up the open (force) side of the field, they're risking one sloppy cut erasing whatever space they'd been able to establish on one sideline.
A horizontal stack system on the other hand, seems to allow a much larger range of movement. Because the vertical stack has been shifted, rotated, or otherwise removed from immediately in front of the thrower, it becomes a lot easier to through both through and to space. However, my brief experience with playing in ho stack systems has showed that they're far more difficult in practice than they are in the theory. Part of the issue, I think, may come back to the twin issues of timing and space. Timing becomes paramount: If the cutters are following one after the other without enough space, the center of the field becomes a sudden mess of bodies, poaching defenders, and frustrated offensive teams. In other words, once timing is lost, spacing collapses with it. Without proper spacing, the first cut becomes the only available cut for the handlers, and teams that can't establish their primary cut find themselves turning the disc over time and time again. While some teams seem to compensate for this by having their best couple of players move constantly around the disc, that strategy seems to run counter to the second aspect of timing: that of developing all the players (or pieces) on the field. In other words, once the defending team figures out how to frustrate the timing and spacing (read: the cuts) of the offense's top players, the rest of the team is out of position to make a play.
On defense, teams have two main options against a ho stack (short of playing zone). The first is to force straight up and try to keep all the cuts coming under. That's the way that my college team played a lot, and it worked against teams that weren't patient enough to reset the disc at high stall counts, instead trying to find deep cuts that ended up tailing out of bounds. On the other hand, it seems like a straight up mark is vulnerable to teams that really understand the value of moving the disc horizontally, rather than seeing the ho stack as an opportunity to jack the disc deep at every opportunity. Forcing middle doesn't seem a viable option because the vertical stack is no longer there and seems to give away too much of the field to the thrower. That leaves a hard sideline force. Admittedly, it's a difficult task if the offense is willing to put the effort in to break the mark, but if the defense is able to pin the offense on one side of the field, they've taken away the tempo and the initiative of the offense.
Chess games are customarily divided into openings, the middle game, and the end game. If the pull and the defense's covering of that pull is the opening, then it becomes paramount for both sides to try to establish the type of game that they want to play. If the offense does want to dictate a horizontal stack, they have to sprint into that set and establish their space from the very outset. Otherwise, they might find themselves (as my summer league team did a handful of times) losing the spacing and the cuts they were hoping to find. From the defense's perspective, establishing the mark becomes the way in which they try to dictate the direction of play. If the defense is able to establish their tempo from the pull, they're at a decided advantage.
In the end, there isn't anything really novel here: cover the pull, clear out hard, the countless other ultimate platitudes that get called out from the sideline. At the same time, I feel like space and spacing might be too little talked about when teaching ultimate. Get stronger, faster, jump higher, learn to throw the disc from end zone to end zone. Though I might be a textbook example of a player who thought about space a whole bunch without the athletic commitment to put it all into practice, I wonder at the same time about players blessed with athletic talent and dedication who have not a clue about spacing on the ultimate field. Beyond that, every so often there's a flurry of activity on RSD about ultimate versus some other sport. In some small way, this might be a way of suggesting new ways of thinking about the relationship of ultimate frisbee to other sports (and even games).
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