The pion.ch backgammon page

Backgammon is a great game, certainly underrated in comparison to chess. While far from devoid of strategical complexity, in some sense it is closer to real life than chess is, since it models an environment from which only a part can be controlled. I find the most important teaching of backgammon to be that :

• The "best" move doesn't always yield to the best result.
• Fortunately, consistently playing best is almost certain to pay in the long run, and requires not to get upset about temporary disappointments.

The concept of equity in backgammon

Equity is the basic concept of any luck-based game. This article is an beginner's introduction to what this concept means and how to use it. You might do yourself a favor by skipping it if you are an experienced player or if you have a background in probabilities.

Bird counting

A simple way of counting rolls which achieve two different goals, a common situation in backgammon. I invented it because I didn't find it in any book ; but since I didn't read that many books, it has probably already been invented before.

Slot backgammon

A modest variant of backgammon, which is very efficient in producing more exciting games, without affecting the way of playing. The only difference is that the first move of the game has to be a "slot", which means leaving a blot in direct range of the opponent's rear point.

An annotated game of Slot Backgammon

In order to show the type of games encountered in the Slot Backgammon variant, I played a training match against myself, had it analyzed by GNU Backgammon and annotated it extensively. The discussion of the cube decisions involves match equities and redoubling considerations. But since I am not a champion, the general target audience of my annotation is the intermediate player with some background in terminology and basic strategy.

Memorizing a match equity table

A match equity table is the indispensable companion of the advanced player, but that is a lot of numbers to learn for the memory-challenged like me. Here is the way I found to retrieve quite precise values from the most popular MET without overloading my memory.

Score cards

The exciting side of match play is that each score is unique. I found practical to summarize the most important numbers about each score on a separate card. The best use of this avalanche of numbers for training is probably to have the relevant score card under the eye when practicing a series of games with the same score, but it is also a nice reference for post-mortem analysis. This is definitely for the backgammon literate since the terminology is not explained.

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