So you've built your full prime, but your opponent managed to anchor behind it. Now what? Of course you have to do the following:
1. bring the remaining checkers (not in the prime) home
2. bear all checkers in safely
It's hard to make large blunders doing this, but I do see XG marking me down for small errors. How should I be thinking about these kinds of positions?
Here is a concrete position:
White - Pips 155. Match Score 0/7
Black - Pips 118. Match Score 0/7
Black to Play 1-1
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www.BGdiagram.com
Here I played 16/14 11/9. XG prefers 16/13 11/10 by 0.026. It appears that this is to avoid a 1-1 joker after 16/14 11/9 (White hits both checkers and covers, trapping 2 Black checkers behind a 5-prime).
A few rolls later in the same game, this position is reached:
White - Pips 135. Match Score 0/7
Black - Pips 93. Match Score 0/7
Black to Play 6-4
Created with
www.BGdiagram.com
Here I played 11/7 9/3, but XG prefers 9/5 7/1 by 0.033. What's the reason for this? Is it just the general principle to avoid stacking your checkers? When I don't see an obvious difference, usually I just bear-in from the outside in. I even once ran into a position where XG said the best play was to break the prime from the middle (something like the 7-point on a prime from 4 to 9) but I can't find it now.