Backgammon Mistakes and Lessons

For example, when Snowie tells me I made a mistake; I look at the right play, and automatically agree with Snowie’s play, or roll it out to make sure Snowie is right or send the problem to some backgammon experts who'll explain it to me, hoping I will remember the correct play if I'll happen to meet a similar or an identical situation again.

Using Snowie that way, I memorize; I can't say that I'm learning. Though memorizing has made one of the world's top players on the opening roll, or even on the opening roll reply. But memorizing won't take you farther than this. Plus, there's a limit to the number of positions and situations one can memorize. So, to really learn how to improve your game, you must understand why Snowie's play is better than your mistaken play.

If you thought about making the 5-point, then you were about to repeat my mistake. The right play is to hit two. Now let's see why. As you can see at the Snowie Eval (Figure 2), if White hits 2, he wins 1 percent less, but 8 percent more gammons. However, it's not enough! The fact that you can win more gammons is the result of hitting two, yet it doesn't come to explain why hitting two is the correct play in this situation.

You'll win more gammons by hitting two because otherwise, your opponent might anchor on your 2-point and it would be very hard to gammon him. Additionally, by hitting two, the builders in position will improve your chances of making your 5-point before he anchors there. Moreover, if you do get hit, Black’s board is not strong, so you can probably re-enter soon and continue attacking.

So, how can you tell? Learning backgammon from experts such as Howard Ring and Perry Gartner, whenever I was showing them a position, they would run the position, examine it and then analyze the position. After the analysis, they would tested it by moving a few checkers, relocating the cube, changing the score to see if any of these factors effect the situation. Each change taught us more about the reason to prefer one way of playing to another.

Attacking vs. Making Point

In the position below you can see that besides the fact that White’s two checkers on the Midpoint are now on Black’s ace point, the position is the same as the one examined before.

As you can see, hitting two in this position would be a huge blunder, while making the 5 point is not a bad choice. Why is that? With White’s checkers back in Black’s Zone, it would be much more difficult for White to close his board before Black anchors on his 5 point. I arrived to this conclusion by moving those checkers. By the way, this lesson can be applied in every position where you have to decide between attacking and making points.

Again, if you examine the same position and change the score, for example at a Double Match Point, making the 5 point is still a better play simply because it allows you to win more games.

Same Position, Different Score

What's the best play in the next position? Same situation, same roll, but Black's board is stronger and has no blots. In this situation, hitting two would be a blunder. As opposed to the first situation, where hitting two was better since if White got hit he could easily enter from the bar, here White doesn't have that benefit. This situation teaches up about the importance of the opponent's board.

Another movement I considered was making the 5-point and then Black anchors on the 2 point on the next roll. Using the "dice" button on Snowie, I learned that choosing this decreases Black games wins to 61% of the time and to 17% in gammons (from 78% and 59%). That way, I came to realize the importance of keeping the opponent from anchoring in situation like this.

Backgammon Lessons Learned

Eventually, analyzing only one position taught me a few valuable lessons. I learned about as the importance of preventing anchors; the significance of considering the score of the game and the location of the cube, the meaning of the opponent's board strength, and about the ability to close the board when hesitating between hitting two and making points.

Since I actually learned these lessons – the chances I won't repeat the same or similar mistakes in future games are greater. Most of us don't have Jake Jacobs’ memory skills (he can tell you the color of the checkers and what he had for lunch the da the play came up!), therefore we should use our acquired knowledge and consider the best play through logic and reasoning. In one line, that's the difference between learning and memorizing

By Phl Simborg

Position Analysis - How Should White Play?

Attacking vs. Making Point

Same Position, Different Score

Backgammon Lessons Learned