hi

iv been playing online poker and made a living that was for almost 2 years now..
but i would like to try out backgammon im totaly new hardly know the game...

i got some questions for you guys

where to play online???

and is it posible to get rakeback???

and what kind of bankroll is needed for the game???

and any really good books i should get???

and is there some traning sites with backgammon videos like (cardrunner.com,bluefirepoker.com ex do)

I can't answer all your questions but I can answer some.
There are several sites where you can play backgammon: partygammon (related to partypoker), play65.com, ... This link will shows a ton more: http://www.bkgm.com/servers.html
Mind you, not on every site you can play for cash (I don't know about rakeback deals).
For practice you can either play humans or bots. Humans you can play for play money, ranking (f.e. on fibs = first internet backgammon server, most popular rating site), or for real cash.
There are several ways to learn the game, but if you want to get really good at it you will have to read some books and perhaps even more important, play the bots. There are 3 bots that are considered very strong: Snowie, Jellyfish and Gnub. Only gnub is completely free of charge. Snowie 4.0 is considered the strongest bot. These bots will increase your skill dramatically; no human has been able to beat them consistently as far as I know. Not only can you play these bots, they also allow you to analyse certain positions, to do rollouts, tell you how strong of a player you are, etc...
I don't know about any training sites for backgammon, but due to the bots (you don't have any pokerbots that consistently beat humans) it doesn't seem necessary.

The book I have heard most people advise for beginners is Backgammon by Paul Magriel. Another known authors is 2+2's own Bill Robertie.

Last thing I want to mention is that backgammon is not a game of partial information like poker. All the information is out there (which is why, I think, the bots are so strong). But, like poker, it also has a brilliant blend of skill and luck.

I played a little backgammon for money online once. I lost. Most of the people willing to play for any reasonable quantity of money are good players.

The hidden information in poker makes the gambling psychology very different to backgammon. People love hidden information in gambling; that's why terrible shows like "Deal Or No Deal" rate well. Curiosity about hidden information is what drives people to gamble at poker as well as at games like blackjack. Backgammon doesn't have any hidden information and thus lacks that fascination the human brain has for other gambling games.

While the human brain might not find any hidden information, you sure as hell get action in backgammon because you are always involved in the game. There is way less grinding to it. I've been playing online on partygammon at the lower stakes and most players I play are very poor players. I analyse the games with gnub afterwards and they make a lot of mistakes (so do I, btw, but genereally less severe). On the higher stakes the players are probably better than average, but what would you expect?
The fact is that if you like action, backgammon is a game that's gonna fit right up you alley. It will take a considerable amount of time however, to become great at it.

A good place to get started is dicearena.com as they recently launched. a lot of new players to the game apparently. I'm also a newb but at least I'm winning 50% of my games so far which I think is "ok" considering I've only been playing for a couple of weeks

I think the idea that backgammon is a game of "complete" information is a bit wrong-headed since each player is missing a very important piece of information: what future rolls will be. This is no different from not knowing what an opponent's hand is in poker.

Intellectually it's no different, psychologically it's very different. As I said, people enjoy the illusion that they will eventually know people's cards through being able to read them blind; this is impossible at gammon where the incomplete information arrives after you have moved.

Quote:
"I think the idea that backgammon is a game of "complete" information is a bit wrong-headed since each player is missing a very important piece of information: what future rolls will be. This is no different from not knowing what an opponent's hand is in poker."

As a matter of fact when you make a decision in backgammon you have all necessary information like in chess. And future rolls are just a matter of probability calculations and theoretically you can make an ideal decision. So the bots those strong.
As for poker you do not know your opponent hole cards and you can get know then only from betting patterns and history. If hole cards were open the game would become in some sense like of backgamon and it would be a game of complete information.

What you and your opponent are going to roll are relevant to your decision, so how do you have all relevant information in backgammon?

The goal even in stochastic games is always to make the play which maximizes your gain given the *actual* outcome. Often, there's no way to find this play, so to compensate we try to find the play that maximizes our average long-term gain when we have knowledge of the relevant probabilities. That doesn't mean that these probabilities are sufficient in order to find the perfect play, they're just tools we use when we have no way of finding the perfect play.

What you and your opponent are going to roll isn't relevant, and maximizing your gain against the actual outcome isn't your goal at all.

The "right" play is the play that maximizes your equity against the space of all your (and his) possible rolls. That's the best you can do, so that is your goal.

This is really a philosophical question. If an angel came down as you were considering your move and said "I bring tidings from the future: your opponent is going to roll 5-3 next and then you're going to roll 6-2", you would be out of your mind to reply "That information is irrelevant to my decision, since I'm still going to play to maximise my equity against all possible rolls". So as a theoretical matter, it is not true that your aim is to play to maximise against all possible rolls.

As a practical matter of course, information about future rolls is fundamentally unknowable in a way that information about your opponent's poker hand is not. So it's really a philosophical question about whether you consider fundamentally unknowable information to still be information.

prepare to get pwned by progs at any meaningful stakes.

i agree!!!

I wouldn't play backgammon for money on the net because of the risk of players using programs to determine moves and cube action (strategically I would estimate that mastering the game is about 30% to determine moves and 70% handling the cube.) It sucks because the skill edge is much greater in BG than in poker. I'm just an average player, but that means I'm good enough to outplay any player who just have played for fun say 8 or 9 games out of 10.

Which is why it won't pick up as a popular gambling game.

Is Dice Arena open to US players?

I want to fire 100 or so on there for the hell of it. I was a winner on Gammon empire back in the day, we'll see if i can replicate the performance. ;-)