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I just finished both volumes of Marty's Praxis. It's a "must have" for
any student of the game. The next time I'm asked to recommend books to
someone who wants to improve his game, I'll tell him to start with
Magriel's Backgammon, proceed to Woolsey's New Ideas, and follow it up
with Storer's Praxis.
My only criticisms of Praxis are what I'd call "right-handed criticisms"
(in contrast with "left-handed complements") in that he sometimes left me
wanting more of things he already did well. Three areas of this sort come
to mind: 1) He uses diagrams very liberally, not only showing the
continuation of the game, but illustrating the alternatives he discusses.
He does this so extensively that there were a (very) few cases where I
missed having the diagrams to help walk me through the action. 2) Marty
does a great job of including bot evaluations and rollouts in his analysis.
And he conveniently presents these tables right along side his analysis,
so you're not constantly fumbling through the appendix to get at them. My
criticism here is that I'd like to have seen a little more robustness in
the bot data--rollouts where he sometimes simply includes evaluations, and
full rollouts to statistical significance where he sometimes uses
truncation or too few trials. 3) Including comments and analysis from the
actual players is a nice feature. It's always great to get inside the mind
of a world class player and understand his over-the-board thought process.
However, while many of the included comments are substantive, a good
number of them don't contribute much. For example, comments like "I made a
pretty good play here" or "I should have made the 2 point" really don't
add much to the analysis.
Again, these are minor quibbles, and they stem from the very fact that
Praxis is of such consistently high quality that it's easy to get spoiled
and want more, more, more.
Hey, Marty, when can we expect volumes 3 and 4?
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