Leading with Your Right is the Standard

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

Watch how your opponent plays the game. Most of us unconsciously fall into patterns. These patterns are, naturally enough, based on what has worked before. So we keep doing them. The result is that we are frequently setting ourselves up for a bloody nose if we do not consciously make an effort to do something different, to break pattern, in order to keep our opponent from getting inside our decision cycles.

Anyone who watched me play tactical games would notice that I had a very strong tendency to "jab left, then swing right". In essence, poke at my opponent's right flank (jabbing left) in order to lure him into committing reserves and focusing his attention there) then suddenly roll to the opposite flank to deliver a hammer blow. In one sense playing at being a "magician", i.e., watch my left hand because the real action is going on where my right hand is.

I had an advantage in that while that was my normal tendency, I also had a tendency to look over an opponent's position to see if I saw an exploitable weakness that would not require me to make the diversionary attack. Sometimes I would attack "right up the middle" because I saw such an exploitable hole (sometimes I would actually make my main effort against my opponent's right flank if I saw real weakness there).

But the jab to the left (in tactical games) was almost something you could predict, and if you were playing me, you could literally depend on my major assault probably landing somewhere on your own left flank (and so marshal your reserves to look like they were moving to your right flank, but positioning them to move rapidly to your left).

This is not actually all that unusual. Most of us are right-handed, and from the time of the ancient Greek Phalanx to the present, there is a strong tendency to make the strongest attack with the right flank. Most Greek Phalanxes, according to what Historians have been able to discover, put their best troops on the right. This often resulted in the best troops of each opposing phalanx hitting the worst troops those on the left) of the opposing phalanx. Whichever side's worst troops gave way first before the opposing side's best pretty much lost the battle.

But, some of the ancient commanders figured this out, and in some of the more famous victories (of the battles fought with phalanxes) reversed the normal order, putting their own best troops on their left, and crushing the enemy's best troops.