It's because I'm giving too many gammons to my opponent. First time I get a situation like that, interesting. Thought I'd share with the good people of r/backgammon
My brother and I had this position come up in a game. I was black and rolled a 5 and 3. I have the obvious option of opening the 6 slot in my home (which in most cases seems like the default best option as it leaves no option for white to take), but we realized that there may be value in simply taking the 3 and 5 out.
We reasoned that given whites position is so far ahead, opening the 6 with no option to retake, all but ensures white winning, whereas if I open the 5, sure, it may be risky, but the odds of him getting back in are now combined with the additional opportunity I’d have to take him and restart the cycle.
I still went with just opening the 6, as it still made intuitive sense, but maybe someone with a better grasp of the game has a different opinion?
(I proceeded to lose, although it did come down to the last roll).
i intend to be more active next year in the backgamon live scene. I ask players that attend face to face tournaments and clubs. Do you need to carry alway with you a backgammon board .
i have one backgammon tournament board but it is heavy and big like almost all. If I will go to a club I will go after work and cycling is my main way of transportation and it is hard take mine with me .
I anticipate one of the answer , you can write to your local club to ask them if you need to provide a backgammon board. My question is broader and I try to understand different scenarios: so how many times do you travel to your club or your travel abroad to a tournament with your own board?
I guess Europe is a little bit different comparing to US where people use mostly cars and there is not an issue.
I’ve been playing online on Lord of the Board app for years and am curious to know if I could cut it in a real competition. I’ve never played live and am not sure if you can just enter or need to qualify? Can anyone recommend an online competition or even better a live venue one ideally in UK or France or Spain?
So I’ve recently started playing Backgammon with the goal of getting good, I’ve played a decent amount of chess and was semipro at poker, I also have a masters degree in statistics so I understand probabilities.
It absolutely amazed me that as soon as I start making Backgammon communities 50% of all the contents of posts is people accusing websites of Dice cheating, why is this?
On the App Store, the reviews for like every app are just saying there’s loads of dice cheating, this isn’t a problem in poker, at least nowhere near as much, do people really just not understand randomness? I’m obviously not an amazing back. Plan, but in my head, what people think of as the Dice being rigged is actually just their opponent (especially AI playing very well so that many of the dice rules would be beneficial.
Why don’t people just do statistical analysis on the Dice roles, you could so easily prove that the dash roles are genuine, it just baffles me how much content and time seems to be wasted on people complaining a lot dice.
I made a cut-down version of gnubg for the ZX Spectrum, available to play now. It's written jointly with AI: I know some people are against use the use of AI; I totally get that, and think that's a reasonable position. You're invited to ignore the game and the site.
It's available on zxgammon.pages.dev, which includes all the source code, and a playable emulation. The site provides helpful scaffolding -- some pretend "loading" as if from tape, match export after your game/match is over, context-dependent keys to click on -- but there's no cheating here, you can download the .sna or .tap and run it on any ZX Spectrum emulator or even on genuine hardware. The emulator plays at the speed it would on the original hardware, but there's an option to run it at 4x speed if you don't like to wait so long for it to think.
The entire site and source code of the game is released under the GPG.
The app works pretty much like gnubg: the same input features and a neural net (smaller than gnubg's). It does something like filtered 1-ply (what xg would call 2-ply) both for moves and cube decisions. It has only 1 output (equity) unlike gnubg which outputs win/win gammon/win backgammon/lose gammon/lose backgammon.
To keep it playable, I tried to limit thinking time to around 10 seconds, and mostly it's faster than that, and just occasionally a few seconds longer.
The app plays pretty well, around on 3-4 PR for money and 1-pt matches, going to around 4-5 PR for match play. So better than most humans, but some distance from top players. It has more of a personality than most backgammon programs I think.
Looking for good Ai-opponent & no ads. I don't mind paying for it. I wonder why they don't have Xg-backgammon.
Thanks in advance,
Rob
Then it procedeed to create a dice generator based on the app's published dice-generator method where player 2 always rolls a double
Try it here:
https://randomdicer.github.io/Dice/
The code it created: