Cash game. Center cube. White on roll.
Position 1: White to play 5-2.
Position 2: White to play 4-2.
In backgammon, most hits are done for one of two reasons: to gain ground in the race, or to attack a key point. A rarer (but still important) use of the hit is a defensive idea called the tempo play. Here the plan is to prevent your opponent from using his whole roll to do something good. By hitting (usually in your home board), you force him to spend half his roll coming in from the bar, so he’s not in position to do something devastating elsewhere on the board.
Diagram 1 shows a common situation where beginners make a tempo hit incorrectly. Black won the opening roll with a 6-3 and ran his back checker to the outfield. White now rolls an innocuous 5-2. Many beginners will go astray here and play 6/1* 24/22. Since it’s a hit, the play looks somewhat active and aggressive, but it actually doesn’t accomplish anything. Black had no powerful threats that White needed to stop, and the checker left on the one-point is both immediately vulnerable and a long-term liability. A better play is the simple 24/22 13/8. It does a few good things (unstacks the midpoint, adds another builder to the 8-point, and splits the back checkers), but most important, it doesn’t do any bad things.
Position 2, on the hand, shows a very different situation. White is ahead in the race and hence has less timing than Black. This means that White will actually have to escape Black’s prime: waiting for it to collapse is not an option. If White is going to escape, he’ll need to throw a two at some point, and – guess what! – he’s just thrown one. So there’s a really strong case for playing 23/21 with the deuce.
Once the checker gets to the 21-point, Black, if left alone, will point on it, or at the very least hit loose. White needs a diversion to keep the dogs at bay, and 5/1* fits the bill perfectly. It has an added bonus (don’t miss this) of winning more gammons for White than any other play. It’s true that shoving what was a nice builder down to the ace-point weakens White’s chances for a full prime, but changing a priming game into a sudden blitz is often the right strategy, especially when neither side has an anchor.
The difference between these two positions is simply the amount of immediate danger that White faces. You don’t like to hit loose deep in your home board, both because getting hit back is usually costly, and because the checker becomes a future liability even when it isn’t hit. So to make the hit correct, you need to be facing very serious threats. In Part (b), Black has those threats; in Part (a), he doesn’t.
