Hey everyone, I just made an account here after lurking the forums for a few days..

I recently gotten serious with backgammon after playing a lot as a kid. I always played with my dad who I believe used to be a well known player. He used to always destroy me and give me ridiculous odds on matches like me starting with 5 points in a 7 point match. After a while of studying the game and perfecting my style, I am now even with him. (recently just won 400$ off of him playing 5$ a point.. great for college money )

I have a few questions for you guys:

1) Where do you go to play backgammon for cash? Most online sites have ridiculous rakes and are easy to cheat by using snowie/GNU. I've tried to look for some backgammon clubs but it seems backgammon isn't as popular as it used to be.

2) I have never used any bots yet to improve my skill. I recently downloaded GNU mainly to watch Robertie's final match vs Rachel Rhodes (nice match by the way). How do I set up GNU to optimize his abilities to improve my skill? Also, is it worth buying Snowie or is GNU perfectly fine?

Sorry if this post was long or a copy of other people's posts, these do seem like pretty common questions but I did not see them answered anywhere.

No, Snowie is obsolete and not worth buying. Either stay with GNU or get Extreme Gammon for $50.

Hi,

I use gnu too, it's allright, it's not so very good in backgames as Snowie 4 is, i heard.

Play against gnu setting it on grandmaster level, also analyse afterwards on grandmaster level.

Furthermore i play on gamecolony.com but not for money, you get a rating there so you can play against other evenly strong players
It's free to register
You can email a played game and you can copy this into a textfile which you can load into gnu and analyse there,

greetings k.

Only tournament. No cashgame. If head to head, 7point matches. At time only fibs for Honor. But you can also ask at www.bgonline.org

XG is best. In all directions. Key is multicore support. Snowie's software got outdated since the pentium4 with hyperthreading, were he used already only 50%. XG supports up to 64 cores, so you need a serverboard with 4 8core xeons, to go to the limit. If you look at the confidence interval at some positions, you need massive Rollouts, so Snowie is now a ford edsel. Even backgames in my opinion, XG plays also well.

Backgammon for cash is a bit of a problem unless you live in a metro area. As you discovered, the online sites have absurd rakes, which makes them unplayable. Go to Carol Cole's site (www.flintbg.com), and look for club listings. If there's a club somewhere in your area, go there to meet people who might want to play heads-up or chouette. If you're at college, put up notices and see if you can find a few people who want to play. Interest in BG seems to be picking up over the last year or so. The recent NY tournament had a record attendance, and other tournaments have reported seeing more players. I suspect part of the reason is players leaving poker but looking for something else to play with a gambling flavor.

Snowie, XG, and GNU are all terrific tools. Snowie has an excellent user interface and plays back games very well, but it's expensive ($380). XG is very fast and is under constant development. It's also a bargain at $50. You can't beat the price on GNU, but every time I try to download it I get a virus warning. Go with XG if price matters. If price doesn't matter, get them both.

So do i. If you make book, for example (nice diagramms), or something else (reference cards), or tracking a match, Snowie is better. But i had Snowie, before XG appeared.

I am still hoping, Snowie will get out of her coffin.