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Black on roll owning a 2-cube, leading 11-3 in a 15-point match.
Black’s Pip Count = 100
You’re playing a 15-point match, and you’ve got a very comfortable lead, 11-3. You were doubled to two early on, and you took. Now you’ve broken contact, and you’ve got a big lead in the race, 26 pips.
You’d like to redouble, but you don’t know exactly when it’s right to do so. Clearly it’s right at some point, but – are you there yet?
Backgammon notation is a way of describing dice rolls and moves on a backgammon board. Prior to 1976, notation wasn’t standardized; backgammon writers would invent their own notation systems, and readers would have to learn a new notation system when they picked up a new book. In 1976, Paul Magriel published his classic book Backgammon, using a notation system that was simple and appealing. Almost overnight, this system became a de facto standard, and almost every book published since then has used it. Let’s see how it works.
Two questions:
(1) What percentage of backgammon is skill and what percentage is luck?
(2) How does backgammon compare to other games in this respect?
Question (1) comes up a lot, but it’s a bad question. Backgammon is a game that combines luck and skill, but there’s no simple way to separate the two. If I said, for instance, that backgammon was 80% luck and 20% skill, what exactly would I mean? If someone else said that backgammon was 90% luck and 10% skill, could we devise an experiment that would prove one statement was more accurate than the other? I don’t see how.
