Hi guys, first of all, I apologize for the "didn't bother googling first" this is more about facillitating a discussion than anything else.

Recently spent over a year living in North Africa, backgammon is ****ing everywhere there. It seems the only hobby Egyptians and Moroccans have is slowly sipping tea or coffee while watching soccer in the background and playing backgammon.

I noticed they often just played casually, rarely did the sets even include the doubling die. It was more to pass the time than anything else.

But it got me playing a bit and I ended up buying a set of my own. I really enjoy the game but the more time I spend playing vs an AI, the more I notice how much the game is determined by the opening die rolls and that there's basically one correct move for each combinatino most of the time.

I'm playing it pretty frequently lately but I'm assuming that the high stakes games are probably mostly optimal play people and there's not enough casual players to really find any edge. Furthermore, is there even a place to play backgammon for money these days? I have no interest playing for money online, I can't see how I'd be playing against anything other than a bot.

What I mean is that 10 years ago, Macau was a bonanza. These days it's 9 pros at a table trading rake back and forth waiting for a whale to sit in the reserved #10 seat.

I am imagining that the high stakes backgammon market is more the latter than the former - especially given how many of the old school poker pros transitioned from backgammon.

I imagine the evolution of beatable games has moved in this direction?

Gin->Backgammon->Poker->DFS->Sports Betting?

Thoughts? Is there still room to really, button down hard and learn perfect backgammon?

I read about 10 years ago that a grandmaster human had beaten the top bot in a series of maybe 1000 cash games(?) I believe the bot already was playing perfectly after contact, and this was well after Big Blue and its handlers had beaten Kasparov.

I assume the bots are infallible now (but please correct me if not...). And a generation has grown up learning the game from the neural nets. Whether suckers are still born 60/hour is up for conjecture.

Beware of casual hustlers not watching the soccer game. For money, use a dice tumbler. Before my local club ("Ace Point") switched to card games, I took a lesson from the proprietor, a world class player. I asked if fixed dice were really a concern. He laughed and said, "No, it's too hard to do but I enforce at least cups at the club".

As he was telling me that, I noticed he had picked up the dice by hand and 'thrown' them on the board- yup...66.

Don't study the game for fun or for profit. You will never "learn perfect backgammon" in your lifetime, it's too complex. That's why the game is so beautiful. There are no probablities in chess. But there are in quantum mechanics...

thanks for the answer

no longer in north Africa and not playing it for money but probably will at some point and you made a very good point about the die tumler

I didn't mean to imply it would be easy for me to play perfectly, and frankly, I think I would enjoy it a lot more if I never studied it and rather figured things out organically - which is how I wish to proceed unless there's a financial incentive to study

I'm just thinking it'd be nice to sometimes go a club and play for $1 or even $5 a point sometime but don't ever see any realistic possibility of being able to sit down with a casual player willing to play for more than that

Playing a bunch of 1 point games without the cube is a different game than than money or match play with the cube.

could you please elaborate?

against people (which is incredibly rare) it's always just messing about, not even keeping score

i also play vs an AI on my phone, that uses chips (monetization) and uses doubling cube but AI almost never uses it until it already has game locked up (acts more like a mercy rule actually) so it's more just an exploit for me to use when I have an early advantage

btw - anyone have any good apps or computer versions to recomend?

Other, more skilled players will stop by to explain this better than I can, but the cube is a tool the player uses to punish his opponent. When you are ahead, but not too far ahead, you can force your opponent to either drop and win a point right then, or keep playing for double the stakes. Without the cube you are forced to play every match to the bitter end and suffer the swings the dice bring.

When playing against the computer make a note of how big your cube errors are compared to checker play errors. Cube decisions during the game are generally the single decision points where you can screw up the most and give up the greatest equity.

As far as I know, eXtreme Gammon is far and away the best app and I will be surprised if anyone here recommends anything else.

awesome, thanks... really enjoying this game and will check out that app - highly disapointed by the AI in the one I'm playing being a cube nit

Extreme Gammon (XG) is the best program out there for desktops and laptops. Also has tons of features.

I don't use phone apps myself but my friends mostly use XG Mobile and recommend it.

thanks for the software tips, just played a game on my phone and it kept pointing out mistakes I've made, simply playing this is going to massively improve my game