Bill Robertie

Play Safe or Play for the Gammon?

Jan 1, 2019 | Backgammon Problems: Endgames

White – Pips 78 (+19)

Black – Pips 59 (-19)
Black to Play 4-1

Back at World Cup VI, in 1998, Kent Goulding and I introduced a ‘Quizgammon’ contest, consisting of a set of 30 problems taken from all phases of the game. Everyone who was interested paid an entry fee of $20 and sat down for an hour with their problems and answer sheet. After everyone handed in their solutions, Kent and I went over the answers and announced the winners. The event was an instant success. Players really liked the idea of matching wits, with the luck of the dice finally and thoroughly removed.

Attacking a Back Game

Dec 15, 2018 | Backgammon Problems: Back Games

White – Pips 206 (+83)

Black – Pips 123 (-83)
Black to Play 6-5

This problem is taken from a game in the Athens finals between Billy Horan and I in 1994. (Billy was White, I was Black.) The game was early in the match and the score wasn’t relevant, so I’ve recast it as a cash game position.

A Backgame Tactic

Dec 1, 2018 | Backgammon Problems: Back Games

White – Pips 77 (-109)

Black – Pips 186 (+109)
Black to Play 6-2

In this position, Black finds himself at the tail end of an ace-deuce back game. Things seemed promising for a while, then not so good, then downright awful. Now, with seven men trapped behind a full prime and his board almost completely shot, Black has a 6-2 to play.

Paul Magriel – The Lost Interview, Part 2

Nov 15, 2018 | Backgammon Generally

The interview with Paul continues with a discussion of tournaments and tournament strategy.

Zelman: Do you dream of backgammon, do you dream of games in your sleep? Do you ever come home afterwards and sit down and think where you went wrong?

PM: In tournaments sometimes you get knocked out and you just can’t get a certain roll out of your mind. It’s like a nightmare and you just go over and over it.

Zelman: Do you have video equipment to tape all your games when you play people in tournaments?

Paul Magriel – The Lost Interview – Part 1

Nov 1, 2018 | Backgammon Generally

In the fall of 1975 Paul Magriel was living in New York and putting the finishing touches on the book he and his wife Renee were writing. The working title was The Complete Book of Backgammon, but it would be changed to simply Backgammon when it finally appeared in November of 1976. Sometime that fall he consented to an interview with Aubrey Zelman, who was creating a new magazine called Backgammon Illustrated. The one and only issue appeared in April, 1976, priced at $1.95.

The highlight of the issue was the interview with Paul, which ran for 18 pages. Paul gave very few interviews for magazines, and what appeared about him in the press was generally brief and uninformative. This interview was very different.

The Zelman interview gave some great insights into how Paul thought about the game at that time, and conveyed a real sense of what talking with Paul was like. Paul would often start a conversation with very brief, sometimes monosyllabic comments. But once the conversation moved to an area where he had real interest, his whole face and manner would change and he’d start talking with enormous energy and enthusiasm. You’ll get a sense of that here, as well as a sense of how exciting the whole backgammon scene was in the mid-1970s.

I’ve broken the interview into two parts because of its length. Part 2 will follow in a couple of weeks. From time to time I’ve added some brief comments in brackets to make Paul’s meaning clearer to a modern player.