Comments - The Battleship Bet
I tend to use the polarity strategy, pretty systematically. I "randomly" select a square to start from, and then guess everything on a diagonal shared by that square. Then I guess everything on a diagonal that is "translated" four squares away from the first diagonal (under the rationale that some ships are four or five squares long). Naturally a hit interrupts that strategy with a "seek and destroy" tactic. Once I'm done with all the "4-translated diagonals," I start on the diagonals in between to find the smaller ships.
So against my "systematic diagonal polarity strategy," your friend's cheating strategy would be very effective, because he would be able to see my guesses coming a long way off.
As for set-up strategies, my only "rule" is that I never put ships adjacent to each other, to avoid the case where my opponent's "seek and destroy" efforts inadvertently hit an adjacent ship.
If it seems like I've given this a lot of thought, I spent many fifth-grade recess sessions playing Battleship against a like-minded friend. We got pretty cut-throat.
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