Cash game, center cube. White on roll.
(a) Should White double?
(b) If doubled, should Black take, drop, or beaver?
Early game doubles cover a wide variety of positions, but in general they can be spotted by analyzing three key aspects of the game: race, position, and threats. Many years ago, Joe Sylvester (a very great player in the 80s and 90s, now somewhat inactive) coined a simple rule: if you’re ahead in two out of three of these aspects, you have a double. Your opponent may or may not have a take. Let’s evaluate these three features of Problem 12 and see what they tell us.
The Race. This is pretty simple. White leads 149 to 173. He’s up by 24 pips, a solid advantage. There’s plenty of contact left, but 24 pips is a big edge.
The Position. White is ahead on both sides of the board. although not by much in either case. He’s made his 5-point and he’s made the 22-point. He’s got a new builder on the 10-point, which gives him a few new rolls to make the 4-point and the 7-point.
Threats. White at first seems a little lacking in this area. His doubles are very strong, of course, but that’s true of almost all early game positions. What we’re looking for here are powerful non-doubles, and there really aren’t many of those, beyond the obvious 6-2, 6-3, 4-2, 6-4, and 5-3 rolls. Still, that gives him 16 good rolls to improve his position. In addition, he’s got 10 checkers in the ‘zone’ (the area from his ace-point to his 11-point), which means that he’s got the potential for a strong blitz.
Our scoring gives White an edge in all three areas, although position and threats are maybe not a strong as he would like. So by Sylvester’s criteria White has a double. And in fact that’s right: White should double. What’s a little more surprising is that the double is extremely strong and in fact Black has a small pass.
Some players might ask “How can it be a pass, given that we’re very early in the game and White’s only made his 5-point?” Good question. The answer is simply that the gap between White’s various strengths and Black’s weaknesses is enough to make it a pass. None of White’s advantages seem all that great, but he has a lot of advantages, while Black has essentially nothing. Compared to the starting position, Black has actually gone into reverse. He’s moved a checker from his 24-point to the bar, and from his 8-point to his 13-point, making his midpoint stack worse and stripping his 8-point.
One last point before we leave the problem. Not doubling here is an easy error to make over the board. White’s position doesn’t easily fit any of the usual categories. It’s not a blitz, it’s not a prime, and in fact White doesn’t have a lot of threats beyond making an additional point with a few numbers. In a game played at normal speed over the board, we tend to rely on obvious visual cues (“Am I way ahead in the race?” “Do I have lots of threats?”) to tell us to think carefully about a double. This position lacks most of those cues. White seems a little lacking in immediate threats, and since both sides have two men back, he isn’t obviously well up in the race. Presented as a problem, it’s relatively easy to break the position down and decide logically that White must be a solid favorite. But over the board, this is an easy double to let slip by, and many players in Black’s position would scoop up the cube.
