How Good Are You at Backgammon?: 50 Challenging Situations for You to Rate Your Ability with the Experts

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 113 pages
• Published by: Writers Club Press April 2001
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0595176429
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0595176427
• Book Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.3 x 0.4 inches
• Weighs: 3.2 ounces

Book Description
If you already play backgammon, don't you sometimes wonder how good you really are? Well, this book is your chance to really find out.

The 50 situations presented here, cover most of the aspects of the game, from initial moves to bearing off strategies. Each problem is graded on the basis of 5 points for the optimum play and some partial credit for sub-optimum but adequate ones, if such exist.

If you rack up a score of 225-250, you rank right up there with the experts—you should think seriously of competing in Backgammon Tournaments. If you score 200-224, you are not an expert yet, but you are rapidly approaching this point. A score of 135-199 indicates that you are a good, sound player, probably the best in your…neighborhood. If you score less than 135 points, there is no need for despair. Study this book carefully. It can serve as a case studies tool for improving your game. Besides, the problems presented are not only mind-taxing, they are also entertaining. And the justifications for the optimum play are clearly explained, often culminating in various useful rules of thumb (the closer-closest rule, the rule of even, etc.) for difficult, but commonly occurring situations. Good luck!

Reader Reviews
The authors describe themselves as world champion backgammon players. I have no reason to doubt this claim. However as expositors of backgammon, they fall fairly far from championship status. The book presents a series of backgammon positions. Given a board position, a roll, and the cube, the reader is asked to find the best move. The authors then assign from one to five points to the reader's selection (assuming that the reader decided upon one of the authors' preselected moves, of course.) Most of the introductory positions are uncontroversial. The authors quickly move on to more complicated board positions however, and here is where the trouble begins. In many positions, they tend to favor the safe play. Certainly a recognized style, but stating that the safe play is the best play, without a discussion of the cube, the score, or any alternatives seems like hubris. In one problem, the authors state that "black is far enough ahead to run in this position", but they make no attempt to quantify what they mean by "far enough ahead", nor is there even any discussion of how to determine when one player is ahead. In another position, where they also advocate a safe play, they make no mention of the possibility of playing for a gammon, and the pro's and con's of that decision. The book doesn't present enough basic principles to be of use to the novice: There are no discussions of pip counts, very little of bearing off, and only a muddled mention of hitting probabilities. The experienced player will find himself disagreeing with the authors without gaining any insight from them. Comment | | (Report this)