What's the skill/strategy behind playing Dominoes?

Seems to be a secret.What's the skill/strategy behind playing Dominoes?
You have to be aware of every single domino that is left available to be played. You have to do 2 things: 1) Knowing what's left, be certain that you will continue to be able to make plays whatever your opponent plays, and 2) Knowing what's left, be able to think ahead a few turns about how many points each person can score. If you want to get really sophisticated, you can actually calculate probabilities--like, "If I play domino X, there are exactly 3 dominos left my opponent could play. One of those will score 10 points, one 5, and the other 0. But if I instead play domino Y, there are exactly 2 dominos left....etc." If you analyze this more carefully, you can actually see ahead to future scores. However, this level of analysis can eventually become second nature (i.e., you can know the possible paths without calculating them) because there aren't that many dominos in a set, only some of them regularly result in multiples of 5 (scores).



Finally, there is a relative score vs. risk factor issue to keep in mind as well, which basically means that the farther you are behind in overall score, the more willing you should be to make high variance plays that give you a chance to catch up, while the farther ahead you are, the more you want to make low variance plays to maintain your lead.