Bill Robertie’s Blog

Equipment Review: The BoneClub Set

Apr 6, 2017 | Backgammon Equipment

The modern backgammon boom continues apace, with new players, tournaments and clubs appearing on a regular basis. New players require new books and new equipment, and thankfully suppliers are appearing to meet the need.

I recently received for review a set from one of the newest suppliers, Bone.Club. The company is located in the U.K. but sells worldwide through its website, https://www.boneclub.co.uk. I picked a color scheme called ‘A Kind of Blue’ (blue, black, and yellow), but several other color schemes are available, such as Purple Rain (red, blue, and purple), Green Dream (green, black, and orange), and others. The colors are all sharp and vivid, which makes for a very impressive-looking set. Here’s a picture of the board I received, showing the striking colors.

Boston Quiz Contest, Part 2

Mar 23, 2017 | Backgammon Quizzes

Last time we looked at Quiz positions 1 through 5 from the quiz contest at last month’s Boston Open. This week we’ll move on and look at positions 6 through 10.
Good luck!

Boston Quiz Contest, Part 1

Mar 15, 2017 | Backgammon Quizzes

The backgammon boom continues apace, with new tournaments popping up on the calendar on a regular basis. Two new tournaments appeared in just the past month: the Boston Open (Feb. 23-26) and the Viking Classic in Bloomington, MN (Mar. 9-12). Both were well attended, with 82 players in Boston and 83 players in Minnesota, very strong numbers for first-time events.

To help kick off the Boston tournament, I created a quiz contest for Sunday morning, with no entry fee and a $100 prize to the winner. Marty Storer of New Hampshire took first place with an outstanding score of 17/20, closely followed by Dennis Culpepper of Virginia with 16/20.

The collection of problems in the quiz is a little unusual. There aren’t any weird, tricky positions or difficult cube decisions based on match score considerations. It’s just a group of pretty normal positions where the choice is between two or three reasonable-looking plays. The idea here is to understand where you want to put your checkers when there’s nothing decisive to do this turn.

More on Hitting

Dec 26, 2016 | Backgammon Problems: Early Game

In the last blog post we looked at some hitting problems in the early game. In this post we’ll look at a couple of more examples where hitting is one possibility.

When you have a chance to hit on your opponent’s side of the board in the early game, it’s usually a pretty easy choice. Gaining a lot of ground in the race, advancing your back checkers, and taking away at least half your opponent’s roll are so important that such hits are usually routinely correct, and even when wrong are rarely wrong by much.

Hitting on your own side of the board is more problematic. Merely hitting is no longer enough of a rationale. Here are some of the other questions you need to ask: