Backgammon Chouettes

Chouettes

Money management

From:   Albert Steg
Address:   asteg@tiac.net
Date:   12 September 1998
Subject:   Big cubes should be rare
Forum:   rec.games.backgammon
Google:   asteg-1209981448100001@asteg.tiac.net

(regarding money-management in chouette play): > Well this is (like it often happens in backgammon) not just a > mathematical problem. In a post of some time ago lots of people agreed > with me that they'd like to cash a 64-cube, even if the position is a > play-on.... Well, yes. When a cube gets *that* big, money management might well be a serious consideration --if not a concern about the effect of a big loss to yourself, a concern about the willingness of some opponents to pay up. This does not contradict my earlier point about playing for a stake small enough to avoid $-pressure affecting your decisions. The reason: if a 64-cube does not make you at least a little bit queasy, then how much concern could you have had for the game when it started out at only 1 point? If a 64-cube doesn't get your heart-rate up, you're playing for insufficient stakes to begin with. After all, how in the world did the cube get to 64? The only people I've seen or heard of getting frequent cubes at 16 or above are those playing for stakes less than $1/pt. Ten cents, a quarter -- unless losing five or ten dollars is a significant blow to the wallet, this sort of tiny stake leads to silly cube action, and is very bad for anyone trying to master "proper" cube play. As an illustration, here are some figures I kept when I first began playing frequently in a $5 chouette ranging from 3 to 6 players down in San Antonio several years ago. I kept track of many figures, one of them being the distribution of my game values (including box wins & losses -- the two "big ones" were box results of +20 and -28): _Game Worth_ _# of games_ 1 point 883 2 points 740 3-4 points 442 5-8 points 125 9-16 points 23 17-32 points 2 Total Games: 2215 Back then my $ was fairly tight, so when I was in the box I was pretty conservative, probably not doubling alI when I should have (thoughI was good about taking all when I believed it was right) -- that figure of "2" in the 17-32pt grouping is pretty small for that many games of chouette. But otherwise, I think the distribution is probably pretty typical of "serious" (in the sense of people caring, not necessarily being expert) chouette play. My biggest cubes ever have been a couple of 32 cubes, one of which I won a gammon on, happily. In that case, my opponent took very badly twice and redoubled terribly once -- because he was already down about 40 pts. on the scoresheet. In the other case, I allowed three "autos" (again, the opponent was way down), so that wasn't even a true "32" cube. It was more of a 4-cube being played for 8 times the original stake. (Oddly, many players don't realize that by "starting the cube on 8" in, say, a $5 game, they are really saying, "Lets play for $40/pt!") I must've played close to 20,000 head-up or chouette $ games in the past decade (I used to spend a *lot* of late nights in Harvard Square) -- and not *once* have I had the pleasure of offering, or the horror of receiving, a 64-cube. I'm curious how other avid $-players' experiences of cube size compare to mine. Albert

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