this is from a cash game. I had the cube at 4 and was playing for gammon. My villain had my five point and I rolled the 61 with two men on my six point. he hits. I had 4 men off. he worked to contain me for a while and i finally escape from the bar to his 7 point with a 2-5. he had one man off.

i can no longer play for gammon. I don't remember his distribution too well but it wasn't great. He had a gap on his deuce point (that's how I escaped with 52 roll), two men on his ace point, a gap on his six point and a stack on his five point.

I had one man on my 4-point, my straggler on his bar point, three men on my ace pt, three on deuce pt and three on trey pt, plus my four men off.

I doubled to 8. My villain thought for a while and took. When he took he said it was a gambling take and it's really a drop. Is he right? in retrospect i think maybe it was easy double/take and maybe no double/take. I needed one and a half rolls on average to get back home. in that time he prob takes two men off, then I came inside and prob take only one man off. so most of the time once I'm back home i have 5 off and he has 3 off with him being on roll. I have a better bear off which prob makes me a favorite but i'm thinking not by a whole lot.

any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks.

Pip count is the key here. Your count is 40, his is about 50-51, depending on how his 12 men are distributed on his 3, 4, and 5-points, and you have three extra checkers off. Any of the bearoff formulas (Keith, Ward, Thorpe) will evaluate this as a big pass. You're probably between 80-85% to win from here.

i see. thanks, Bill.

well talk about the cruelest game. At this point in the session I'm up 8 points. But it's the last game cuz I had to go. (I think this influenced his decision to take.) he rolled a couple of sets and cubed me out with the 16 cube, so we ended up even.

The crazy think is that there was an epic aspect to that game that made me not mind so much that I went from almost winning 16 points to winning no points. I've played poker for years and one thing i've noticed is that i find it way easier to deal with variance in bg. Maybe I just like the game more.