A friend I play with swears that money games are the toughest form of backgammon.

I know this is the case with poker (especially deep-stacked no limit poker), but i've often thought it's the opposite with backgammon because so often cube and checker play are affected by the match score.

is my friend right? he's played for decades so I want to believe him, but I don't know. . .

Depends how you define 'hard'.

Tournament play has more complex cube and checker decisions, but much lower psychological cruelty due to the fact that like a poker MTT, your risk is limited to one buy in and most players expect to go out without winning much (if anything).

Compare this to playing high stakes cash backgammon against a very aggro player with beavers/racoons and the cube auto turning on starting doubles etc. Here the game's mechanics are simpler, but the overall game state is much tougher to stay consistent and good in.

Staying focussed and calm after watching a 64 cube get stuck back in your face after being a 99% fav against some cackling maniac for amounts that matter is arguably a much harder thing to deal with than a weird cube decision at 5-1 up in a race to 7 etc.

Wamy nailed it. Tournament play is technically harder because the score factors into all decisions, but psychologically easier because the risk to your pocketbook has been quantified.

Backgammon culture is full of stories about great tournament players who lost all their profits back in cash games. Players who are good at both forms of the game are actually pretty rare.

I see. thanks, guys.

My friend thinks cash play is more complex and says there are less things to learn for match play, but that just doesn't make sense.

as far as psychology that's another matter. but i'm glad to hear my friend say that, because as I learn more I'm beginning to see that he has a lot of leaks, even though he lived off of the game back in the 80's.

i've lost a few hundred to him over the last two years, but I'm actually ahead against him by a bit over the last 100 games or so. Is a hundred games sufficient sample size to know how you match up vs someone? My guess is no cuz in poker you need a sample of at least 50k hands to know where you're at skill-wise.

It depends on how big the skill difference is, and how loose the players are with the cube. If there's a big difference, say a world-class player against an intermediate, then 100 games is plenty. If the skill difference is only slight, then you might need a couple of thousand games to be sure who's better.

If one player doubles and takes aggressively, then the variance will rise sharply and more games will be required.

I've never played cash backgammon. The closest I've come is chouettes where we just play for points and at the end of the night, whoever has the most number of points is the winner and thus gets bragging rights. In match play, you have to adjust your checker play and cube decision based on match score thus it would benefit you to know how to play multiple styles. I have the impression that cube decisions are less nuanced in cash play. You have to/can cube earlier because of the Jacoby Rule but I don't know of any cash situation where you're supposed to pass takes or take passes assuming both players are near equal skill.

I see I see