Backgammon Fun and frustration

Fun and frustration

Lonely checker's lament

From:   Luvrhino
Address:   nospam@gammonvillage.com
Date:   27 August 2001
Subject:   lonely checker's lament
Forum:   rec.games.backgammon
Google:   3b8a4bee$1@rti-ns1.runningtide.com

OK, last night on FIBS i had what was by far my most frustrating match of backgammon in the month-and-a-half that i've been playing this infernal game, even though i won It was a 5 pt. match and i quickly took the lead 4-0. My opponent proceeds to beat me in 4 straight games to tie the match 4-4, since chose not to double me post-Crawford. He had a ~1440 rating with several thousand games experience, so one would think he'd know to double. These games were rather frustrating since i had a commanding racing lead in three of the four games, only to be victimized by a flurry of opponent doubles at the end to lose by one roll. Now that was plenty exasperating, but it was but a mere pinprick compared to the concrete enema of annoyance that was the last game. I was kicking major booty and beared- off all but two checkers on the 2-pt., when an unfortunate 5-1 gave my opponent a chance to hit me. He did, of course. At that point, Opp. had a three-point (2-4-6) home board with a spare on the 6. The other 8 checkers were strewn across the outfield like extras from 'Gone with the Wind.' I then spent the next 10 minutes attempting to extradite my sole checker, without luck. I wouldn't have minded so much, except that Opp. wasn't making the moves that might allow him to eventually win the game. He didn't slot any of the three missing points in his home board in order to close me out, excepting one time when he hit me on his 5- pt.. Moreover, he had several opportunities to prevent me from escaping in one roll with a 5-5 by making the 10-pt. or the 15-pt., but he didn't do that either. Instead, he stubbornly followed the 'Gone with the Wind' strategy, which only had the effect of lengthening an already ludicrously long match. After 10+ minutes i finally rolled boxcars and escaped. Naturally, he refused to resign when i asked him politely if he would be so kind to do so. This game made me curious about a scenario, which hopefully one of you Snowie/Jellyfish people can answer for me. What is X's chance of winning if he only has one checker left against a closed-off board? +24-23-22-21-20-19-------18-17-16-15-14-13-+ | O O O O O O | | | | O O O O O O | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |BAR| | | | X | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-1--2--3--4--5--6--------7--8--9-10-11-12-+ And how do these odds change if O still has the three spare checkers on, say, his 24-pt. instead of being born-off? My best WAG is that X would win just under 80% of the time in the first position and maybe 83% if those three checkers still need to be brought all the way around the board. Loquaciously, ken

Gregg Cattanach writes:

Your story is funny (maybe not so much for you!), especially with your opponent's misunderstanding of post-Crawford doubling. A similar story I heard was a club match in Florida where the 'expert' was up 8-0 in a 9 point match, then proceeded to lose 9 straight SINGLE games (no cubes or gammons) to a rather elderly lady that neither understood the cube post-Crawford, nor apparantly much about how to move the checkers. The story concludes that the expert was never seen or heard from again at the club. Snowie evaluates your position, (12 checkers, full prime against 1 on the roof: the only checker to get home) as the person with 12 checkers winning 12% of the time. If he has all 15 checkers to bearoff with the spares on the 4, 5, and 6 points (which is his best setup of all 15 checkers), he only wins 8%. The number is less because he generally doesn't get the chance to get 3 checkers off cleanly without opening up a point or leaving a blot. (These are based on short/full 2-ply rollouts).

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