Bill Robertie welcomes the opportunity to share his knowledge of backgammon with experienced players and beginners alike.
On his blog, Robertie publishes set and equipment reviews, creates quiz contests and provides free lessons. He would be remiss not to include his Robertie’s Rules! He also educates readers of the Gammon Press blog on the history of the game, offers backgammon instruction and more.
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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.
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?
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.
In this position Black has established a solid grip on the position. He’s escaped all his back checkers, built his 4-point and his 7-point, and leads the race by 68 pips (122-190) before rolling.
A couple of months ago I asked readers of this blog to send in their suggestions as to what would make an ideal tournament in their view. I received many responses, some brief and to the point, others long and thoughtful. Rather than try to summarize all the various responses, I’m going to discuss tournament structures in general and how they might be changed or improved, working in some readers’ comments along the way.
We are in the very early part of the game and neither player has much structure. White has, however, made his 4-point.
Problem 1.
Here are two early game positions where Black doesn’t have much and White has an inner point and some pressure.
Problem 1:
When bearing in against an ace-point or other low anchor game, you generally have two goals in mind. The first is safety; you want to create formations that are less likely to leave blots as you bear off. The second is winning a gammon; you’d like to maximize your gammon chances if you can.
It’s usually good practice to look at the gammon chances first. If your gammon chances are either very large or very small, then it’s not likely that any play you make will affect them enough to matter. In those situations, you just make the long-run safe play, whatever that might be. But if the gammon is up for grabs (which in practice means gammon chances in the 15% to 40% range) then you may need to look for riskier plays which win more gammons at the cost of some extra losing chances. Typically, these plays involve piling checkers on the 6-point and 5-point, hoping to hold the prime as long as possible, or bearing off checkers rather than clearing a point.
A full six-prime is the most powerful formation in backgammon. A checker trapped behind a six-point prime can’t escape. To win, the trapped player has to somehow force his opponent to break his prime.
Although building a full prime is the strategic goal in many positions, we don’t actually see too many six-primes over the board. Often, the mere threat of making a six-prime will force a double and a drop. Although six-primes aren’t common, they are governed by their own set of strategic principles. Let’s take a look at a few.
