These strategies can be thought of as alternative courses of action that the two sides, or "players" in the parlance of game theory, can choose. They lead to four possible outcomes, which the players are assumed to rank as follows: 4=best; 3=next best; 2=next worst; and l=worst. Thus, the higher the number, the greater the payoff; but the payoffs are only ordinal, that is, they indicate an ordering of outcomes from best to worst, not the degree to which a player prefers one outcome over another. The first number in the ordered pairs for each outcome is the payoff to the row player (United States), the second number the payoff to the column player (Soviet Union).