Backgammon winning Chances
The Backgammon player must know his chances of winning and losing. Of course, in real life that's not possible unless you let a computer play out the game thousands of times.
The top players do not try to calculate their chances down to the third decimal place. But unless you have a framework for making decisions about checker plays and cube decisions, you can't make informed choices.
Sometimes, of course, you can know exactly. Say you have two checkers on your ace-point and your opponent has two checkers left, on his 5 and 2 points. He doubles. He has 19 rolls to get both checkers off out of 36, for a 53% chance to win - you take. Suppose they're on the 5 and 1 points. 23 good rolls - 64%. You still take. Suppose they're on the 4 and 1 points. Now he has 29 good rolls, or 80%. Time to drop.
But in most cases you can only estimate. The better your ability to estimate - the better you'll do at backgammon.
| backgammon |
|
