So a stupid friend of mine owes a world -class player 3 and a half hours of backgammon with doubling cube 2 tables on yahoo gaming with no stalling allowed. How points should the world class player win in this 210 minute period??

Some numbers I've seen thrown around:

Expert could be a 70%-30% favorite per game depending on how bad your friend is.

Bad pokers players lose more than they should with their bad hands and win less than they should with their good hands. The same will be true for your friend wrt the cube.

I have no idea what the average time for a game will be so I can't even guess how many games they'll play in 420 minutes.

Give someone else a chance to answer before you try and figure out what a fair buyout for your friend would be.

Too many variables to guess imo. Is your friend a total bg noob or a decent player? Also, stalling is a very vague term, some people naturally play slower than others and there could be some legitimately tricky spots where he has to think about his best move for a while. Is he planning to go down with a fight or just try and limit his losses?

They are really playing 210 minutes, unlike poker playing many tables won't speed the game up too much.
By 5% maybe, so either individual games have to be timed, or an expert thinks that 2-tabling would force your friend into making stupid mistakes, since no recreational player 2-tables ever.

The edge a world class player will have over even a decent player in my experience is unfathomably/unbelievably large.

I was decent having trained / played vs my father growing up. He has beaten (schooled a world chapion over 21 games (monte carlo tournament)and is from the school of 48 hour sessions with the greeks that never ever ever give in.

When push comes to shove Id be lucky to nip 3 games out of 10 v him. Im sure others will disagree but world class vs even a decent begineer is morosely large for your friend.


The edge a world chapion player has over a beginner is not a linear messureable unit, its logarithmic with a big arse jump when you go from quite good to world class.


It's a nice game backgammon, truely a sweet past time.

Impossible to answer without seeing a game or two of the 'stupid friend'.

Could be 200-300 points, could be 50-60 points in a 400-game sample. Just no way to tell.

Average length of a cash game in BJ is generally taken to be SEVEN minutes, but I would guess that the standard deviation is pretty high.

For match you can guess the winning chances - if you know the rating - with the rating calculator (http://www.netadelica.com/bg/fibscalc.html). If we suppose a rating from 2100 to 1500, the Worldclassplayer is a 2:1 favorite in a 1 point match. In a longer match or with cube and gammons counting in a cash game, the edge must be even larger.

For what it's worth, (which is probably very little) I've just spent an entertaining 20 minutes playing XG's 'World Class' setting against its own lower levels. After 50 games against each opponent, results were as follows:
vs. Beginner: +70
vs Intermediate: +36
vs Advanced: +39
vs Expert: +27

So, Advanced got spanked even harder than Intermediate through luck of the dice, and even being an expert didn't help much, but they are about the only two crumbs of comfort on offer to your friend...

An estimate of 7 minutes for a cash BJ is probably not too far off but I suspect that the standard deviation is pretty low.