If you Google ‘World Backgammon Champions’ you’ll find a number of lists scattered around the web. For the years after 1979, when the tournament moved to Monte Carlo, the lists basically agree except for some minor points like the actual score of the final match. Prior to 1979, however, the lists differ in a number of respects. In this post I’m going to lay out what I think is an accurate list for the period 1967 to 1979, based on printed sources of the time and some conversations with players who were then active. I’ll also explain how some of the discrepancies between the various lists came to be.
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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.
