Strategic Profile

A strategy profile (sometimes called a strategy combination) is a set of strategies for all players which fully specifies all actions in a game. A strategy profile must include one and only one strategy for every player, as to respond in the best and most rational way to the decisions made by other players.

The strategy concept is sometimes (wrongly) confused with that of a move. A move is an action taken by a player at some point during the play of a game (e.g., in chess, moving white's Bishop a2 to b3). A strategy on the other hand is a complete algorithm for playing the game, telling a player what to do for every possible situation throughout the game. It is helpful to think about a "strategy" as a list of directions, and a "move" as a single turn on the list of directions itself.

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