New Blokus Champion?

Tonight Parker saw our Blokus game and asked me to play it with him. At first I said no, it's a grown-up game, thinking that the rules were too hard, but he persisted and I relented and taught him how. The rules are actually pretty simple: you take turns putting down your color's tiles, your tiles have to touch corner-to-corner but cannot touch side-to-side; whoever has the fewest leftover tiles at the end wins. He picked up on the rules immediately, and even though we were both basically playing random pieces (there's a fair amount of strategy that you can/should employ), he almost beat me: I had 40 pieces left over, he had 41. Wow, Not bad.