Okay, so these spots confuse me. The game has degenerated into a pure race, and I have the option of either bringing 2 checkers into my home board or moving checkers that are already in my home board to empty slots.

When I analyzed the spot with snowie right after playing, it recommended 6/1 6/5 as the best play, followed by 7/1, 7/2 6/5, 6/1 2/1, 7/2 7/6...

I would always play 7/2 7/6 because it seems like I should be trying to get my checkers into my home board as soon as possible so that I can start bearing off.

But then when I made a new position in snowie today and analyzed it, snowie recommended 7/2 6/5, 7/2 7/6, 6/1 6/5, 7/1, 6/1 2/1 ...

So what's the best play here and what's the general strategy in these spots? Any help is appreciated.

Check the match score and the cube location.

In your position, even though you may soon have all your checkers in your home board, any 5 or 1 will prevent you from actually bearing anything off. In general, gaps on the 5-4 points are bad because they lead to "wastage."

What it means that if you roll 5s or 4s, you not only don't bear off any checkers, but you also dump checkers onto the 2 or 1 point. When it comes to bearing off, if you have all your checkers down low, then you don't get as much value out of your rolls. For example, if all your checkers somehow wound up on the ace point, then rolling 65 is the same as rolling 21, and you've "wasted" 8 pips.

As a general rule in the end game when preparing to bear off, it is important to try and maintain a smooth distribution of checkers on all the points. It is bad to have gaps and stacks because this makes it more likely you will roll something later which does not let you bear off at least two checkers. Every other time you roll something which prevents you from bearing two off, you have lost a roll to your opponent.

You have no possible rolls which would fail to use two crossovers, and can afford to make plays within your board to help achieve smoothness. Once you are completely home, you should almost always bear off the maximum possible as first priority instead.

Given a choice between a crossover which stacks more on the six point vs. unstacking plus filling a gap, I would always play the 6/5 part of your roll. It's not as clear cut on the other half. I would take the crossover and play 7/2 because this leaves you with an even number of half rolls remaining (three more to get home, plus fifteen to bear off is eighteen half rolls which is an even number). If you play 6/1 then you can not bear off in the absolute minimum number of (non-double) rolls, but you do fill the gap on the ace point which is useful. There is no guarantee you will eventually roll something later which fails to bear two off, and that's what the 7/2 play caters to here.

Thanks that make sense. Oh and it was a money game and no one had doubled yet, so im still unsure why snowie gave different recommendations.

It's too early in the race to be concerned about even/odd effects.

JLee

I think Robertie mentioned a position in his 501 problems. He quoted some analysis saying that the best position to start bearing off is to have k-1 men on the k-th point for k=2,3,4,5,6.

Right. Another way of putting it is to say that as you bear your checkers in, you're trying to build a triangle, heavy on the 6-point and light on the 2-point, rather than just get all your checkers in as fast as possible. The triangle shape gives you the most efficient bearoff for a given pipcount.