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Humor
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Give Me a Break--Give It a Number 
By Phil Simborg and Stu Katz (1994).
"We got sick of hearing our friends tell us about how they lost a game that just couldn't be lost, so we developed a code to save time."
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A Coin Toss
By Phil Simborg (1997).
"I pull out a coin and say, 'Heads I take, tails I drop.' The crowd goes crazy, and Jake is of course a visibly perturbed" ... Oh, the fun you can have with the flip of a coin.
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Fifteen Ways to Irritate Your Opponent
By Phil Simborg (1994).
We all know that an irritated, distracted opponent will play worse. Here's some "advanced" tips for you. (Use with caution.)
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Simborg's Laws of Backgammon
By Phil Simborg (1996).
You don't have to play backgammon long before you realize there are certain unwritten rules of the game that every player should be aware of.
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The Ten Commandments of Backgammon
By Morten Wang (1997).
"Remember the tournament day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou read thy theory, and play for money, but the seventh day is the tournament day." These are the laws of backgammon you simply must follow.
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Scientific Steaming
By David Montgomery (1999).
Almost everyone has experience with players who "steam" when behind on the score sheet. I realized that there ought to be some way to mathematically define how you should change your cube actions based on the score sheet.
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Fun and Frustration
By Tom Keith.
From the Backgammon Galore Forum Archive, a collection of humorous articles about backgammon that have been posted over the years.
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Puzzles
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Jemimah's Beaver Creek Double
By Stein Kulseth (2000).
A puzzling cube handling decision with a centered 8-cube and a maximum value of 64 for the cube.
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Jemimah Plays Nackgammon—Not
By Stein Kulseth (2000).
How many rolls/moves does it take to go from a standard starting position to the starting Nackgammon position?
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A Position from Jemimah's Past
By Stein Kulseth (2000).
Can you reach the indicated position in just three moves for each side?
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The Worst Move in the World
By Kit Woolsey (2000).
What is the worst move in the world? The object of this contest is to construct a position, roll, and play which is the worst move ever.
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The Great Prime Problem
By Bill Davis (1999).
From the opening position, given three legal moves in a row, can you build a Great Prime from your 2-point to your bar-point? You get three rolls of your choice, including doubles. Your opponent doesn't get to move.
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Backgammon Puzzles
By Tom Keith.
Lots of puzzles using a backgammon board and dice, from the Backgammon Galore Forum Archive.
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Stories
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My Bumpy Life in Backgammon
By Ric Gerace (2001).
"How I found backgammon, or how it found me, and how I lost the girl, and then another girl, and oh, hell, it's been fun without them anyway."
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Backgammon Hustler
By Michael Konik (1999).
In the jet-set world of little ivory disks, impeccable manners are essential when separating a fool and his money.
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Shoot the Chouette
By Jake Jacobs (2000).
A chouette tournament runs like this. Twelve of us entered, and were given a stake of 35 points. We drew for boards, forming three tables of four. Each player had the right, if he lost his stake, of reentering once. To insure that players would eventually lose their stakes, after 8 games the doubling cubes would start on 2, and after 16 games on 4, etc.
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Barry Fisk and the Early Cube
By Stein Kulseth (2000).
At times I regret the day I decided to teach Barry Fisk how to play backgammon. We have played weekly sessions for a few years, and by now I guess nobody has learnt more about backgammon than Barry without being able to apply it to the game. I am not giving up though, and I have even made a promise for the new millennium to stop shouting at him.
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Honors
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Backgammon Hall of Fame
By Tom Keith.
The best backgammon players of all time. Here are the winners of all the major tournaments and other important accomplishments in the game.
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International Tournament Results
By Carol Joy Cole.
Tournament results from around the world, dating back to 1998.
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Giants of Backgammon
By Yamin Yamin.
Which players are the most respected and feared by their fellow competitors? Every two years since 1993, Yamin Yamin of Illinois has surveyed Championship-level players and tournament directors around the world. He asks them to rank the best currently active players in the world, considering both tournament skills and side action.
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American Backgammon Tour
By Bill Davis (2005).
The ABT master point race is an annual event patterned after the American Contract Bridge League's point race. Master points are earned for the year by players who cash in the tournaments. Once earned, they can never be taken away. So the ABT winner will likely be an individual who has attended and placed in a good number of tournaments during the current year.
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Snowie Ranking List
By Iancho Hristov and Karsten Nielsen (2006).
Matches recorded on GamesGrid of some of the best players in the world are analyzed using Snowie to determine the error rates of the players.
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Champions of Major Tournaments
By Martin Short (2001).
As there is no single worldwide backgammon organization, there is no single premier tournament. But here are the winners of five major competitions.
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World Champions of Backgammon
By Neville Kerr (2007).
List of the winners and some of the history behind the World Championships of Backgammon.
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Photos
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Max's Backgammon Photo Album
By Max Maxakuli.
Michael "Max" Maxakuli was publisher of the Las Vegas Backgammon Magazine for a decade during the 1970s and early 1980s. Over the past 30 years, Max accumulated a treasure trove of people pictures from the days when the backgammon scene was an elegant way of life.
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Backgammon in Advertisements
By Hardy Huebener (2007).
Some examples of backgammon featured in magazine advertisements throughout the 20th Century.
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Theory
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Backgammon Ends
By Douglas Zare (2000).
Proof that it is impossible for a backgammon game to last forever. If you use random dice and any legal playing strategy (even trying to lose), then the probability the game has ended by the nth move gets arbitrarily close to 1 as n increases.
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Theoretical Curiosities of Backgammon
By Tom Keith.
Articles on various mathematical properties of backgammon and interesting formulas and facts about the game. From the Backgammon Galore Forum Archive.
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Academic Papers
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Efficient Approximation of Backgammon Race Equities
By Michael Buro (1999).
This article presents efficient equity approximations for backgammon races based on statistical analyses. In conjunction with a 1-ply search the constructed evaluation functions allow a program to play short races almost perfectly with regard to checker-play as well as doubling cube handling. Moreover, the evaluation can naturally be extended to long races without losing much accuracy.
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Optimal Doubling Strategy against a Sub-Optimal Opponent
By Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos and Ozgur Simsek (2005).
An algorithm for deriving the optimal doubling strategy of a player who is aware of the suboptimal strategy followed by the opponent.
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Last updated: 11 Jul 2008
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