NIU

Backgammon

Posted by Stacy on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 3:33 PM

In some of the online backgammon games that I was playing, whenever I'd be playing against a particularly strong opponent, I would realize that, despite the fact that we both seemed to be rolling pretty poorly each game, they would beat me soundly, over and over. This makes sense, since my sense of backgammon strategy was essentially nil. My first attempt to look up backgammon strategy yielded pretty poor results, but when I kept losing over and over in games where I thought that I was, in fact, getting somewhat better rolls than my opponent, and therefore had to have a good chance of winning, I figured there must be something I was missing. I started looking.

A somewhat difficult concept, that I don't yet grasp, but one of the most interesting, is called "duplication." The basic idea is that you need to lay your pieces out in such a way that your opponent's best moves all require the same number. That is, make it so that all of your opponent's good moves require, for example, a five. It can seem relatively simple and elementary. If you have to leave two unguarded pawns ("blots," they're called - a single pawn placed on a pip that your opponent can hit and knock out of the game for a little while), leave them so that in order to hit either of them, your opponent would need the same number. This will reduce the number of good moves that your opponent can make. There are trickier applications of the strategy, though, and those ones I have not yet mastered in any comprehensive way. They involve considering a great number of your opponent's possible moves given a certain number rolled in combination with any other number rolled, and seeing what number always yields his best moves. You can use duplication there by making your vulnerable spot open only to a number that already would yield a good move for your opponent even without that extra vulnerability. That's a kind of duplication.

The problem with the subtle applications is that they clearly require a much more comprehensive understanding of backgammon strategy as a whole. Descriptions of them allude to a lot of moves as "obvious" that I would never guess were the obvious move at all. So of course, like learning to play any game well, strategies are all intertwined, and just learning about duplication hasn't improved my backgammon game that much yet - but it's a start.