Backgammon

Author: gambler104

Nackgammon is a fairly commonly played backgammon variant on BrainKing as well as many other sites. The rules are exactly the same as backgammon; the only difference is the starting position. In nackgammon, a couple of pieces are moved back to your home area in comparison to a more forward position in backgammon. Naturally, nackgammon is a game itself and it is fun and exciting to play it as such. But I also believe nackgammon can actually help improve your backgammon game. The advantage of nackgammon is that it can help you learn how to play positions where you are at a disadvantage.

Sometimes early in a backgammon game, you can get a couple of your pieces knocked back Often times, people misplay these positions and end up losing rather easily. And while nackgammon doesn’t involve the pip disadvantage, you can learn certain strategies playing it which can help you compensate for this disadvantage. However, I think that the most important thing that nackgammon teaches is the lack of importance of maintaining a prime for the whole game. Some backgammon players excluding top players tend to try to hold on to all possible primes; they do not want to leave a piece vulnerable. In nackgammon this is practically impossible. First, it takes more and different types of doubles to advance the pieces from your home area without giving up the prime. And it is much harder to advance other pieces without eventually leaving one or two exposed. So you have you have to learn to become comfortable with giving up certain primes; it also allows you to learn what type of primes you should typically give up. And although it is easier to keep primes in backgammon, it is often not advantageous to do so. Ideally, you would like to keep all your primes for the whole game; however, this is almost always impossible. So to become a better backgammon player, it is useful to learn when to keep primes and when to give up primes to try to advance pieces. And I believe that a really good way to do this is to practice nackgammon.

Practicing nackgammon isn’t going to improve your backgammon game enormously; after all, you really don’t want to get into a position where you are playing from behind. And you would prefer to keep primes for the whole game. But in certain situations, it is necessary and advantageous to learn nackgammon strategies and apply them to backgammon. And I do believe it can help improve your rating by a few points, and in the worst case scenario, it will least give you a chance at having an exciting game.

Author: gambler104

In any gammon game, doubling is a vital aspect if you are playing a match. A well-timed double can help you earn extra points or more importantly save you from getting out raced at the end of the game. In fact the doubling cube may decide the match between two relatively equally matched players. In many of the gammon variations, doubling can be very obvious. It still requires some skill, but a pip count will more often than not tell you whether you should double or not (if you are late enough in the game). And most of the time, there is never a question of whether to double or go for a gammon or backgammon. However, one variation that is supported on BrainKing in which doubling is not so obvious is Hyper Backgammon. The game is a highly volatile game in terms of sudden swings of advantage. Take for instance the case where you have borne one piece off and have the remaining two on spots 3 and 1 leaving you with a pip count of 4. Your opponent may have pieces on 13, 19, and 19 (according to BrainKing setup). If it is your turn (and to a lesser degree if it is not your turn), you are almost guaranteed a gammon. There are only 2 rolls out of 36 in which you don’t get the gammon that turn, and even if you don’t, your opponent still has to roll certain doubles to prevent the gammon. But if you do happen to roll a 2-1 and your opponent rolls a 6-6 you lost the game. Fortune can change in the blink of an eye, so the question is, when do you double and when do you not double.

Author: gambler104

If someone were to ask a chess master how to become better, he might suggest many different options. The person could play games, read books, or insert their games into a chess program and let it evaluate the game for it. The third option here is the most effective. For a relatively cheap price, a person can be given expert analysis move by move. By doing this, a person can learn different situations and learn better moves for future games, and by doing so, they improve their performance. This could be done without a computer, but it would take a much longer time for humans to analyze and much more game experience to learn different situations and the correct moves for them. This is not the case in backgammon.

Computer programs are still in very early stages for analyzing backgammon games. The major reason for this is the complexity of analyzing backgammon games. There are 21 unique die rolls that must be taken into account. This means that there are going to be many more combinations in each position to analyze in backgammon than in chess. When one considers that the programs have to this for many moves into the future to effectively analyze a position, he can easily see that computer programs for backgammon are not going to be as effective as ones for chess. It is important to remember that these numbers must come from humans and to look at just two die roll for each opponent requires looking at 194,481 permutations of die rolls not to mention the different possibilities of moving associated with each one. The amount of time that this would take to set up is enormous. Thus, although some computer programs are being developed for backgammon, they are not near where chess programs are.

The second reason for difficulty in mastering backgammon is how luck affects how much players have to memorize. In chess, a player can learn a set variety of openings and positions. For example as white, the player may choose to focus solely on positions that start with e4. This takes away roughly 1/18 of the possible positions. In backgammon, there is no way to this. Any of the 21 rolls are possible. Despite the fact, that 15 of the rolls are twice as likely as 6 of the others, a player must be prepared to play any of them. Thus there is even a greater discrepancy in the number of unique possibilities between chess and backgammon.

Due to these two reasons and perhaps a few others, learning backgammon is more difficult than learning a game such as chess.