Hey everyone,

I'm pretty new to this forum, and backgammon as well, but wanted to post a few questions in hopes that you might be able to provide some answers so here it goes:

1. What are the best sites to play online backgammon on? In poker we have Full Tilt and Poker Stars which are of top notch quality - does the same thing exist for online backgammon? If so, what sites are there?

2. I use a mac and so far I haven't been able to come across any 'mac friendly' sites - do they exist?

3. What book is the equivalent of Brunson's 'Super System' in the Backgammon world?

4. Who are the top online backgammon players? In poker there's durrrr, Ivy, Haxton, Jungleman12, etc. but has that league of play developed in Backgammon as of yet?

5. Is there a similar site to 'Poker Table Ratings' where you can check your online Backgammon game stats and results?

That's all! Thank you in advance for all you help :-)

I can answer #3...the 70's "bible" of BG is "Backgammon" by Magriel

1- Gamesgrid.com, PlayWSOB.com, Play65.com. Google "gnu backgammon" and see if they have a mac version. On gamesgrid you can play in the browser and play against a "bot". their "probot" plays a VERY tough game. GnuBG is a masterpiece of a program and invaluable tool for evaluating your play...best of all its free :-)

2- I'm PC all the way. maybe someone else can help.

3- Magriels Backgammon, anything by the host of this forum Bill Robertie, I'm working through Woolsey "New ideas in backgammon" although this is definitely for more advanced players with a solid understanding of the game. I heard good things about Bray's Backgammon for blood but haven't read it yet. If you search through this forum you'll find some great book suggestions, just do a little digging.

4- I don't know about this one so much. there's guys like Falafel...not so much a household name but a strong cash game and tournament player with a consistently low error rate. Gus Hansen and Dan Harrington are both strong BG players as well who's name you should recognize. Maybe someone else can chime in on this.

5- there's sites where people play for ratings but I mostly play for cash so someone else can answer this question better than I.

Backgammon is a deep pond, enjoy the swim.

Hi,

100 backgammon puzzles from Paul Lamford is also a good book, and gamecolony.com is a good site,

greetings k.

1.
TMG and Grid Gammon, the old Games Grid resurrected, are nice. There are no sites with backgammon having nearly the same quality as PS and FT in poker wrt. functionality, information and service, unfortunately. The developers of XG have a site with some nice features but it jas never really gained momentum maybe due to the annual fee.

2. You might be ale to find some sites having Java based clients, but it is a usual a Wondows fixed business. There is also Java interfaces for FIBS.


3. The equivalent of Super System would still have to be Magriels "Backgammon". If I were to start building my bg library today from the bottom I would start with Roberties Backgammon for Winners and Lamfords Starting out. Then I would get Magriel and Roberties Bg for serious players. Next, Roberties 501 Problems and then Trice's Bootcamp, and then Modern Backgammon followed by New Ideas. From there pick what looks most fun to you (Annotated matches, puzzle books or some exotic Kleinman).

4. It is not as easy to work out the nicks of the online bg pros as the online poker pros ) At Grid Gammon there are quite a few world class players playing, including some from the US biased Giants List.

5. I dont think so.

Mordell,

I agree 100% with that list. If he/she gets these books in the list and study them in the order you placed them, they should become a decent player.

This is amazing! Thank you so much for all you help - much appreciated!

Zen1th,

I am a Mac User (25 years) and a BG player (41 years)

I strongly suggest:

1. Buy Backgammon Boot Camp
   
2. Join F.I.B.S. (free) (Play using an iPad preferred)
   
3. Buy the excellent BG Blitz (cheap)
   
4. Go To http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7983/bgblitz-x

BGBlitz has the by far strongest gameplay of all commercial backgammon games on the Mac, is the winner of the 2003 Computer BG World Championship and is the winner of the 7th Computer Olympiad 2002. Some of its features:
Play against BGBlitz, with it's top neural net technology
Easy to use
Superb graphics
Play over TCP/IP against a opponent at a different computer
Rollout Positions.
Let the tutor improve your play.
Train your skill with position quiz databases.
Analyze interesting positions.
Train your cube handling in matchplay.
Supported languages are English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Hebrew,Swedish,Catalan
And much more...
Download Now
WHAT'S NEW
Version 2.7.0:
the checker movement looks more smoothly now
support for the new Look and Feel "Nimbus" on Windows and Linux
new themes elSpaans 1001 Tawlas (elSpaan) and Feltastic (Sam Rich)
The dice rolls are animated
visual feedback for used dice (not available for all themes)
the doubling dialog shows an image of the current cube value
small screen sizes are handled better better, especially on Linux and netbooks
When you use manual dice, you can now enter the dice with the keyboard
there is a shortcut for doubling (^d)
the font size is adjustable in case your visual ability is reduced
the status bar shows the EPC (equivalent pip count) instead of the Thorpe Count
if you want to train calculating pips, there is a new toolbar button, that can be used to switch on/off the display of the pip count and shows the value of the pip count in the tooltip
in the best moves dialog you can select to shown up to 50 moves and this dialog and the evaluation dialog always shows cubeful equities
in the edit position dialogs you can also enter the combined position/matchID and the XGID. Further you can copy and paste either the combined position/matchID and the XGID or drag and drop those IDs on the board to get an evaluation (if no game is running). In all exports (ASCII, HTML) the XGID is given too.
the only small thing in the AI that has been changed in this version is a better cube liveness heuristic in end game situations
for casual players the level of game play for lower strength settings was reduced and made sure they can't accidentally use a higher search depth. Would be great if I have some guinea pigs to check whether those settings are o.k. for beginners.
do you know the feeling: "Why I get always the worst roll?" There is a new dialog, that shows you how good each roll of dice would have been ("Game/Distribution of rolls")
now you can install BGBlitz on an USB-stick (Just copy it on the stick and add a folder .bgblitz in the bgblitz directory)
there is a new command line interface. It allows evaluation of positions and might be extended in the future if you have some ideas how to use it. You can use the programming language Groovy to write your programs
Support for Snake is included (a Backgammon variation with a different starting position)
you can read/import/convert "sgf"-files
a Czech translation
I invested a lot of work to make BGBlitz faster. Tuning with modern Java implementations and the newest CPUs with Turboboost is a nightmare because it is very hard to measure what is an improvement and what is noise. Nevertheless I succeeded making BGBlitz faster. The improvement depends heavily on the operating system (32 or 64-Bit), the Java-version and your CPU. The speedup is between 15% to 70% (64-Bit, Core i7 or Atom). This new stuff does some things that might not work on all computers, and even crash BGBlitz in rare cases therefore you could disable this speedup with "Setup/Miscellaneous Setting/No Unsecure Speedup". If problems occur, please drop me an email. If the new code is disabled, BGBlitz runs rock-solid as usual, only a little bit slower.
some improvements for the network play, so it works better with multi homed computers and routers
Close to 50 further improvements and fixes.