Hi Bill,
Congrats on your new book. Any chance of an excerpt or table of contents?

Regards,
Omar

P.S. I not sure how to paste and Image of the book nor the link. Could someone please help out? Thank you.

I'll be posting both a table of contents and a link to an excerpt here shortly.

Nudge

I started the book. Excellent read. I appreciate the notes on the evolution in the thinking of the pre-bot sages... A few Q's:

1) How confident are you that the eXtreme Gammon rollouts shall be the Last Word on this set? I don't expect a human to ever beat it, but a faster bot might come along...

2) Is there much variation at double-match point? Not only does it come up often enough (with 100% match equity riding on the result...), but any alternate plays could offer insight into the analysis. Knowing that the cubeful option is only correct because of extra gammons won or lost might help you factor gammon risk for later decisions .

3) Are Bagai's reply rules nevertheless useful? Not to play opening and response perfectly without understanding why, but to use a mental shortcut to the best position on the third roll- where you may gain insight into assets and liabilities using hindsight ("backtesting"). Like in chess where you start from the simplest endgames- if you don't have the time or patience to play them all out, you can still improve by memorizing the set of results. The logic may become apparent from play at a different stage of the game.

There's an excerpt from the book now posted on my blog. Go to thegammonpress.com and click on the blog and it's the May-01 article.