Some more backgammon tips gathered since the last update: 

Making the Best Possible Move

Generally, it is advisable to go through all possible moves before playing the roll. Or in other words, don’t make any move until you’ve ruled out the alternatives. An easy way to accomplish it is by playing half of the play with the second half in mind. For example, in the game, if your opponent has hit loose on his 5-point and you plan to enter with a 5-3; you can play the 5, hit, and then look for the best possible move to play the 3. 

Splitting in the Early Game

In the early game, it is commonly correct to split your back checkers, especially if you have 1/2/3 that does not hit or make a point. By that, you can easily escape your back checkers, plus it will put pressure on the opponent in case he/she will leave blots in the outer board. In the early game, split your back checkers when your opponent has 2, or even 3 checkers on his 8-point, but if he has 4 checkers, don’t split. 

Studying your Backgammon Game

Backgammon matches in professional tournaments and championships are often recorded for studying and analyzing. But even if you are not a pro, you can save your online backgammon matches and analyze them (using backgammon programs such as Snowie or JellyFish) to learn from your mistakes and get better in time. Note that the bots, and most of the human players are not so strong on backgames, therefore, you can feel unobligated to adopt its recommendations in these cases (or others). 

Match Play vs. Money Play

Cube decisions, in particular, are more difficult to make in match play comparing to money play, so if you are used to play money games you are obviously required to adjust the match situation and score when you are playing backgammon tournaments. To learn the difference, you can use any backgammon analyzing tool of your choice to run evaluations of the same play at double match point and as a money game. By that, you can learn how gammons (or their absence) affect the cube decision or any other decision.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 at 8:19 am and is filed under Backgammon Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.