Stotting in positional games

Abstract

We introduce variants of the Maker-Breaker and Waiter-Client games, which we call \emph{stotting}, in which a player grants a slight advantage to the opponent. We prove that a winning strategy in either stotting variant yields winning strategies for both Maker and Waiter in the classical setting. Several existing Maker strategies in the literature in fact win with stotting, and therefore automatically provide both classical winning strategies (and similarly for stotting Waiter). Knox previously disproved a conjecture of Beck asserting that whenever Maker wins the Maker-Breaker game, Waiter also wins the corresponding Waiter-Client game; in this sense, our framework may be viewed as a way of repairing Beck's conjecture.