I played a 11 point game today on Grid, won luckily 11:10. So far so good. But i was shocked after i saw the summary: 16 games with 41(18) Errors in Doubledesicions. My opponent had only 6 mistakes with 2 Blunders. How can i improve. I didnt read anything about the cube. Most of the time Iam doing the Prat System.
Iam a lazy guy. Books i have: the BG Bible, Bootcamp, How to improve in Backgammon. Anything else? Homepages? I want to become an Expert in Doubling. Sorry for my English, Iam from Germany.

Karsten

I am certainly no expert at this game but I can tell you that my checker play is adequate and my cube play pretty bad. It seems to be a very difficult thing to get right.
I have a copy of Robertie's 501 and I'm finding it to be a great way to improve my game, including cube decisions.
I am also a lazy guy and I find the best way for me to improve without a huge amount of effort is to play a lot on GNU set to full tutor mode. The pop up window telling me i am about to make an error gets irritating, so I do my best to make the right decisions!
GNU is a great program, absolutely free, and easier and more fun than reading.

I suspect most of those errors were missed doubles, i.e. not doubling when you should. Human psychology of risk aversion plays a part here; people want greater surety. Try to think aggressively.

Continuing this theory, probably a fair number of those errors are missed doubles on consecutive moves. I tend to consider this as one error (not recognizing the situation as a double), spread out over multiple moves. But the cruel bot flags you with a new error every move.

So maybe it isn't quite as bad as the data suggest. Look at it this way: if you correctly double early in the sequence, all the subsequent missed double errors go away too. You can't double because you already did

Using the doubling cube is a crucial skill. Here are two good resources:

"Winning with the Doubling Cube", by Peter Bell. It's an introduction to using the cube properly, with loads of explanation and examples.

"501 Essential BG Problems". Intended for slightly more advanced players, with plenty of cube examples.