A little further on in the same game, this position came up:

[IMG][/IMG]

Playing 20/18 18/15 is an error, and I've noticed this a few times when I have several of his pips trapped. It seems that after a certain point it is counter productive to hit. Surely the more the merrier?

Obviously white's main priority is to make a full 6 prime. He can slot the 8 point, and prepare for covering without much potential punishment, as blue has 2 blots in his homeboard, and still a very long way to go. Once the 6 prime is made, for sure the blot on the 18 point will get out of play.

Hitting just helps his timing. He wants to get hit because it would reduce his chance of crunching. In the ideal world, you want all of his checkers stacked on the ace point so even if you run into trouble bearing off, his board can't hold you.

Timing is something that hasn't yet started to figure into my thinking. I need to stop thinking just about the roll that is in front of me, and the whole board a bit more.

Thanks for the replies.

Also keeping the 20 point makes some of his numbers truly horrible. Look at 44 after you make the correct move.

Is this also timing?

I've stared at this for 10 minutes now, and can't work out I shouldn't hit him on the way through.

[IMG][/IMG]

Don't feel bad. This is what we call in the business 'a tough position'. If you took this to a tournament and showed it to several good players, I guarantee you'd get a few votes for hitting (24/18*/15) and not hitting (24/15).

The difficulty here is that the position isn't a clear fit into any one category. It has elements of a back game, since Blue has four men back. But it's not a true back game, since White's 5-point and 7-point are still open. This means that if Blue can trap a White checker behind some sort of block, he may be able to wiggle his back checkers out and get real counterplay.

If White had his 5 and 7-points made, so we had a true ace-deuce backgame, I'd fell comfortable running out without hitting and letting Blue eventually crunch his board. Here, I would have hit over the board, to make sure that I could get my back checker home, and maybe get a move or two to fill in the 5-point, which I really need.

Your evaluation shows that XG on its XG+ evaluation prefers not hitting by a little bit (.024). I did an XG++ evaluation and got basically the same result. In complex positions with back-game elements, a rollout will sometimes overturn the evaluations, so I'm doing a rollout right now of the top 6 plays and we'll see what happens. If the rollout confirms that not hitting is best, we'll all have learned something.

nice pick

The rollout did confirm that not hitting is best. Interesting play. Thanks for posting it.

i would have hit OTB, however i would have thought about not hitting as well. the good thing about that is i'm seeing things now i havent been before. Playing 6-10 hours a day has helped lots too.

I can see that helping a fair bit! I thought I was doing pretty well with about an hour per day!

the reason why so many hours the past 10 days is I have a friend here from Europe and we been betting pretty high(for me playing BG). So the sessions have been long, non-stop. He is loose with the cube, my cube play sucks-however its better than his so i been able to leverage that. I can tell when he will recube me and I can take a 1 point game and get 4 out of it fast.

we play his rules if we toss doubles before the game the cube turns, if you dont like your first roll you can recube. i havent averaged it out yet but were most often on a 4 or 8 cube every game. last night I gammoned him with a 16 cube, nice!!! Very few games are at 1 or 2 on the cube.

Biggest swing in one session was around 110 points, i see him make blunder after blunder, I'm sure I do too, just less of them so i'm just fading the dice and grinding him down. its fun too, lots of fun.

Very interesting position. I would`nt even have considered not hitting.

Here's another one. Almost exactly the same, in that the same holes in the prime result in a not-quite-a-back game scenario.

I tried playing it out both ways a few times, and noticed that after I hit him, he ended up with 3 points in my home a couple of times. It made bearing in impossible and he ended up with several shots. Is giving the opponent too good a back game also a motivation in not hitting?

[IMG][/IMG]