In the 1970s, the New Yorkers invented a term for the new style of backgammon they were playing, a style based upon aggressive hitting and slotting. They called it pure play. The essence of pure play was the willingness to take risks in the race to build a crushing prime quickly. If the plays worked, you had a winning prime. If your opponent got lucky and hit you a few times, you just had to outplay him in the resulting back game/holding game. (Since the top players played these complex positions very well, this was usually no problem.)
Cash game, center cube.
Black to play 3-2.
While they were naming their own style, the New Yorkers also coined a name for the opposite style – the beginner style of playing safe and stacking up your checkers. They called it playing squat.
Playing squat isn’t the same as playing conservatively. A conservative player may be uncomfortable with aggressive slotting, but he has enough experience to know that stacks are weak and that sometimes slotting and other risk-taking is necessary to keep your position from becoming unplayable. A squat player doesn’t know that. He’s a beginner, and he thinks the goal of the game is not to be hit. When you believe that, you’re going to create some big stacks before your game falls apart.
Players who study the game even a little learn the basics of taking small risks to improve their position, and avoiding big stacks. As a result, they create normal, good-looking, balanced positions, and they gradually learn the rules of handling those positions. They don’t see many squat positions in their own games, unless they come about by a freakish set of rolls.
But here’s a little secret about squat positions: like back games, they have their own logic. As your position becomes more and more squat, you lose the ability to fix it by making what would be normally aggressive developing moves. In a flexible, well-balanced position, you’d rather not be hit after a slotting play, but your game is strong enough that you can survive and play on. In a very stacked position, being hit and falling behind in the race can be a disaster. Thus we get to the squatting paradox: the more stacked your position, the more you may have to make ugly stacking moves.
I call the positions that fit these conditions the squat zone. When two decent players play each other, they may never see one of these positions. Real beginners, however, practically live in the squat zone.
This position is a classic example. White didn’t necessarily do anything wrong to get here – he may have just rolled an ugly set of boxes at some point. But however it happened, his position is a mess, with a big stack on the 6-point and a smaller stack on the midpoint. He’s clearly going to enter and hit with his three, and then he can choose among three different deuces.
In a more normal position, the obvious choice would be between 6/4 (unstacking and slotting a good point) and 13/11 (safer, and forcing Black to break a good point in order to hit.) In this squat zone position, however, both these alternatives are too loose. White doesn’t gain enough when the plays work, and he loses too much when his blots get hit.
His best choice is the bizarre-looking 8/6, putting a seventh checker on the 6-point. His game plan is to try to capitalize on his big racing lead by running his back checker home, while trying to avoid leaving any extra blots. In the squat zone, 3-2 almost qualifies as a perfecta! It hits, gains ground in the race, and plays safe. What a shot.
