Robertie: Advanced Backgammon
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I recently purchased a copy of Robertie's Advanced Backgammon (both
volumes), I'm finding the books rather difficult though. I've started
playing backgammon beginning of this year and have read Paul Magriel's
Backgammon several times (3-4 times) and have understood the concepts
and noticed that my game improved much after Magriel. But Robertie's
Advanced Backgammon seem to be too difficult for me at the moment so I'm
wondering what people here would recommend me to do. Are there good
books out there targeting an audience whose ability is between Magriel's
Backgammon and Robertie's Adv. Bg.? Another thing I noticed which is
discourging me a little is that Robertie's analysis is quite deep and
extensive requiring much time to think about which isn't the discourging
part but rather that it is hard for me to imagine that I have to come up
with all this analysis in the few seconds I have to make my move! It
looks like it takes 15-20 minutes to solve some of Robertie's problems
but in FIBS people start swearing at you if you take 20 seconds ;-) so
I'm kind of discouraged! So what would you people advise me to do?
Stop being a wimp and sit down and try to absorb Robertie's Adv. Bg. or
maybe look for some other book in the meanwhile? Don't get me wrong, I
think Adv. Bg. is very good, it's just targeted for the more
advanced-expert player IMHO.
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Gregg Cattanach writes:
Robertie's analysis IS extremely detailed throughout 'Adv. Backgammon', but
that is its best quality. You can just skip over some of it, and realize
that a lot of what he describes is not necessarily what an expert player
actually does over-the-board. Especially all of the estimates of number of
wins/losses/gammon in 36 games. Some may attempt this much detail, but in
your head you can only do so much.
Keep chugging through these two books, they really do show you the things
you should try to consider while analyzing positions. Lots of book just
give the 'answer' and a flip reason why, but especially in this book, you
can see how he got to the conclusion. Also beware, because perhaps 5% or
so of the positions give the 'wrong' answer in light of what we know now
with the neural nets.
For the intermediate, I'd also recommend Robertie's 501 Positions. Lots
more positions, much less detailed but still interesting analysis, and nice
logical groupings of the positions. And it is formatted like a quiz where
you can guess first and then go look up the answer.
Gregg C.
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Brad Davis writes:
I have rolled out all these positions with Snowie 3.2 and I can tell
you about 25% of these positions have errors. Some errors being very large.
I will go as far as saying people (without the rollouts) should NOT read
these volumes as they contain too many errors.
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Douglas Zare writes:
We get much of our information from imperfect sources, and it is valuable
both to have such sources and to have indications of their errors. I
wouldn't stop recommending Magriel's _Backgammon_ because of the bad advice
about action plays and the opening 5-3. There is too much good stuff, such
as the emphasis on the golden point and the unrivaled discussion of
duplication. I just warn my students not to take it as gospel.
I think there are far too many good ideas to skip these books.
Incidentally, there are many more than 400 positions discussed, as many of
the problems have multiple variations, and Robertie makes a lot of side
comments about nondiagrammed changes in the position that would affect
decisions.
I've often disagreed with the analysis of particular positions. If it is by
a lot, then I follow Robertie's other advice, and play the position out by
hand (or more commonly now, with Jellyfish interactive rollouts). Sometimes
I get to adjust my intuition. Sometimes Robertie is dead wrong, but then I
understand a common misunderstanding that my opponents will have.
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