Tim Harford makes the case that simplistic applications of game theory to the ongoing Israel-Hezbollah conflict don’t capture the realities of the situation. A popular understanding of game theory, and the prisoner’s dilemma in particular, holds that a “tit for tat” strategy — where you initially cooperate with the other party, until they defect and attack you, at which point you punish them until they start cooperating again — is oftentimes the most succesful approach to a conflict. This is mostly based on the computerized tournaments that Robert Axelrod ran between different strategies, where Tit For Tat came out victorious. But Harford points out that for a variety of reasons real world conflicts don’t typically fit the repeated prisoner’s dilemma model.

But “tit for tat” is just a little too much of a poster child. The repeated prisoner’s dilemma is a poor description of real-world situations. It didn’t describe the Cold War, when a nuclear exchange was a one-off game if ever there was one. It doesn’t describe the asymmetric struggle between Israel on one hand and multiple decision makers—Lebanon? Hezbollah?—on the other.

Most important, the “prisoner’s dilemma” is merely a two-player game. Game theorists such as Ken Binmore, a professor at University College London, say this is a crucial omission. Most social arrangements stand or fail with the help of third parties. The crisis in Lebanon will be no exception.

In any case, “tit for tat” is not quite as successful as conventional wisdom would have you believe. A team from Southampton University kicked “tit for tat” off the top spot in a rerun of Axelrod’s tournament by entering a collection of team players who colluded with each other. Another successful strategy is “tat for tit,” which first tries to exploit the other person and plays nicely only if that doesn’t work. Another winning approach is even more depressing, punishing cheats with eternal vengeance.

Read more: Hezbollah and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

In today’s Slate, Tim Harford writes about using game theory to analyze the optimal strategies for strikers and goalies in a penalty kick situation.

In soccer, penalty kicks pit the goalkeeper against a lone striker in a mentally demanding contest. Once the penalty-taker strikes the ball, it takes 0.3 seconds to hit the back of the net—unless the goalkeeper can somehow get his body in the way. That is simply not enough time for the keeper to pick out the trajectory of the ball and intercept it. He must guess where the striker will shoot and move just as the ball is being struck. A keeper who does not guess correctly has no chance.

Both striker and keeper must make subtle decisions. Let’s say a right-footed striker always shoots to the right. The keeper will always anticipate the shot and the striker would be better off occasionally shooting to the left—because even with a weaker shot it is best to shoot where the goalie isn’t. In contrast, if the striker chooses a side by tossing a coin, the keeper will always dive to the striker’s left: Since he can’t guess where the ball will go, best to go where the shot will be weak if it does come. But then the striker should start favoring his stronger side again.

So, what to do? The answer comes from a wartime collaboration between economist Oskar Morgenstern and mathematician John von Neumann. They produced a “theory of games,” which mathematically analyzed situations of strategic interaction—that is, any situation where participants have to take into account the other side’s responses. A free throw in basketball is not a strategic interaction, but a soccer penalty is. A “game” is a mathematical description of how all the possible payoffs to the different players vary with their different strategies—so if the goalkeeper jumps to his left while the striker shoots to the keeper’s right, the striker will get a high payoff and the goalkeeper will get a low one.

In fact, at least one economist has recently studied the strategies players use in penalty kicks and found them to be nearly perfect in a game-theoretic sense. In this complex subgame of anticipation, feigned signals, and reaction time, top soccer players are extremely skilled at maximizing their chances of scoring a goal.

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, an economist at Brown University, found that individual strikers and keepers were, in fact, master strategists. Out of 42 top players whom Palacios-Huerta studied, only three departed from game theory’s recommendations—in retrospect, they succeeded more often on one side than the other and would have been better altering the balance between their strategies. Professionals such as the French superstar Zinédine Zidane and Italy’s goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon are apparently superb economists: Their strategies are absolutely unpredictable, and, as the theory demands, they are equally successful no matter what they do, indicating that they have found the perfect balance among the different options. These geniuses do not just think with their feet.