Posts Tagged tips on backgammon

Backgammon: This Game is Crucial -3

Posted by oscar in Backgammon, Board Games on January 16th, 2009

Challenge 2 Contd.

White’s chances of attacking or priming improve greatly if his back checkers can get into the action. For example, if Red plays 9/7, 9/6 he’ll be quite sorry if White rolls 6-6.

The men on the 22, previously blocked, leap into action 6 pips away from the Red blot, making a broken prime that puts the blot in great jeopardy.

Red’s prime is potentially useful in many other scenarios too. White could attack successfully but then fail to escape, especially if Red extends his four-in-a-row to five or six.

If Red’s blot escapes, the prime could keep White from getting into the race with big doubles and make it easier for Red to bear in, and off, safely.

Another possibility, which one sees frequently with a 22-point game, is that White could crash when Red still has a strong board, then get queezed off the anchor and succumb to an attack.

So we see that Red’s solid four-prime is an asset well worth preserving, and that an alternative to 9/7, 9/6 should be sought, but which? Playing 7/4, 6/4 or 8/5, 7/5 make good home board points but leave a double shot that might let White simultaneously hit and escape a checker, and this is even more dangerous because Red already has one blot.

Playing 8/5, 6/4 is pure and pretty, perhaps best if you know that White is going to roll 6-6, 5-5 or 6-5… but 32 shots with 3 blots is really overdoing it. Moving 13/10, 13/11 leaves a bunch of fly shots while making it easier for White to diversify in the outfield.

The right play is something easily overlooked until you have examined the alternatives. Playing 6/1* preserves Red’s assets. The fact that it is a hit softens the danger of leaving a second blot exposed to a direct shot.

It works as a tempo play, slowing down White’s incipient attack. At worst, if Red gets hit, he is still playing 4-prime vs. 4-prime with the advantage of only two back to three. Playing 6/1* isn’t the sort of thing you’d really like to be doing.

It either gets hit or buries a checker. But it is the least damaging out of a rather weak set of possibilities.

To properly appreciate the value of Red’s 4-prime, especially the point six away from White’s anchor, it helps to play the game out a few times and take note of the role played by the prime in what follows. Let’s just glance at a few of the innumerable possibilities after 6/1*.

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Backgammon: This Game is Crucial -1

Posted by oscar in Backgammon, Board Games on January 16th, 2009

Backgammon is a complex game. In the course of analyzing a position and deciding on a play it is easy to get lost in the details – the counting of pips and shots, the comparisons with reference positions and other factors.

Those factors influence the stereotyped decisions about whether to hit, split, slot, point, break, jump, run, or anchor. One may lose track of the big picture, or even forget that it exists. That is when the big blunders come and the crucial plays get overlooked.

So I have decided to present some problems and analyses, now and in the coming weeks, that will illustrate the game planning process. Some expert readers will find some of the problems to be easy, especially when they are presented as problems.

But I can assure you that any of them is capable of tripping up anyone who has forgotten to ask himself the question posed in our title.

For others, future experts, who do not have under their belts the zillions of games that have contributed to the expert’s “big picture”, the problems will hopefully clear up some mysteries about plays that are obvious (on a good day) to some of us and utterly baffling to others.

How many ways are there to win a game of backgammon? Ask an experienced player this question and he may well say that the number is limitless.

He will have played many thousands of individual games, all different from one another, except for a few standard opening blitz sequences quickly ended with a double and a drop.

He will have learned to detect hundreds of subtle positional features that dictate different strategies in superficially similar positions, and if he has played long enough he will have learned that the one thing you can always expect in any given game is – the unexpected.

But I believe that fundamentally there are only three ways to win. Whenever you see a position in which one player has a substantial advantage, he has either a big lead in the race, a strong attack in progress, or a prime that pretty securely locks up one or more of his opponent’s checkers.

The three ways to win are racing, attacking, and priming. I have learned that in backgammon it pays to keep an open mind, and I am still looking for a fourth way to win, but I haven’t found it yet.

Thus in a broad sense the game-planning problem is multiple choice. But since the dice are random, the choices are not mutually exclusive, and many positions contain the potential to evolve into any of the three types of advantages for either player, often more than once in any given game.

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