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Cash game. Black owns the cube. White on move.
White to play 5-1.
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 chances of winning a gammon if you can.
Cash game, Black owns a 2-cube.
White to play 4-1.
Back at World Cup VI, in 1998, Kent Goulding and I introduced a ‘Quizgammon’ contest, consisting of a set of 30 problems taken from all phases of the game. Everyone who was interested paid an entry fee of $20 and sat down for an hour with their problems and answer sheet. After everyone handed in their solutions, Kent and I went over the answers and announced the winners.
> Black’s open 3-point needs to be filled in before he starts his bearoff.
> The open 7-point is a small nuisance.
> Black still has to clear the 16-point.
Are all these problems serious enough to stop Black from doubling? Or is the 2-point game so weak that White already has a pass? Before we answer these questions, let’s take a little look at the structure of the 2-point game itself.
In this position White got stuck playing an ace-point game which didn’t go well for him. Now he’s lost his 6-point, and next turn he’ll either have to break his board or run off his anchor.
Meanwhile, Black is doing reasonably well. He’s cleared his 6-point and managed to bear off two checkers. The weakness in his position is the stripped 3-point, which might cause problems once the 5-point is cleared.
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.
