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.
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Bill Robertie
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Comparing Games of Skill and Chance
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.
