Gravity Assists

Most tutorials for gravity assists online say to “just play around with maneuver nodes and you’ll get better at it” but I don’t find this answer very satisfying. Instead I have distilled the following 6 rules to help me plan what assists to use before I take off:

1. You enter a sphere of influence with the same speed you exit
2. If you do two assists in the same location, you will enter the second assist with the velocity you exited the first
3. The greater the mass of the body, the more it can bend your trajectory in a single assist
4. The greater the relative speed, the more you can get out of assists
5. High inclinations and oblique angles means greater relative speed
6. Fly to where you want the encounter to be, rather than where the planet is.