When Paul Magriel Ruled the World (of Backgammon)
Everybody is talking about the 1970s as the heydays of backgammon. But if you missed those times, you can only imagine the luxurious yachts and exotic locations that accommodated the high stake backgammon tournaments, the lascivious groupies that surrounded backgammon stars and the stacks of cash piled at the end of the match.
In 1979, Sports Illustrated journalist Roger Dionne accompanied Paul Magriel, aka x-22, aka the human computer, in his "book-lined, television-less Manhattan apartment" to the palace of Prince Nawaf Ibn Abdul Aziz in Saudi Arabia (giving private backgammon lessons to the prince), and to a crowded Casino Las Vegas (losing to an anonymous player in a 25-points $10,000 match), managing to give a more focused look on what really happened there 30 years ago.
Back then
Paul Magriel was then 32, winner of more than 50 backgammon tournaments (including the world backgammon championship held the same year at the Bahamas, the author of the book Backgammon ("which quickly became to the game what Paul Samuelson’s Economics became to economics in the 1950s—the authoritative text on the subject"), and doubtlessly, the best backgammon teacher in the world.
Magriel begun playing chess at five, and at nineteen he won New York State’s junior chess championship. Not wanting to sacrifice his entire day to improving his play, he decided to quit playing competitively. In college, he was occupied by nickel-and-dime poker games. And his interest in games drew him to mathematics and more specifically to study of probabilities. And then he was introduced to backgammon.
"I was very, very lucky. I stumbled on backgammon, and it happened to be exactly right for the kind of talents I have." He explains "I’m always at war with luck and disorder. I’m always trying to impose my will over the randomness of the dice, over what seemingly has no structure… what I’m trying to do in backgammon is create order out of chaos."
This ambition did not pass once he won the most prestigious title in the backgammon world. "’I feel ambivalent about the title world champion. It’s only one major tournament among others.’ He compares the relatively short Paradise Island tournament, which culminated in a 25-point final that took about three hours to play, to the three months it took Anatoly Karpov to defeat Viktor Korchnoi for the world chess championship, and the hundreds of deals teams must play in the world bridge championships." In his way, Magriel refers to the luck factor in backgammon.
"People think there’s so much luck in backgammon. But that’s very unfair." He reserves. "That’s totally false. Backgammon is much, much more difficult, much more complex, much deeper than anybody can imagine." To lessen the luck factor in major backgammon tournaments, he suggests lengthening the final to 100-point matches.
