I'm leading post-Crawford/4a. He rolls 65 (run), I roll 31 (point), he doubles, and I drop thinking I'm a slight underdog. It turns out I was correct that I'm a slight underdog, (about 48-52%), but dropping was a -0.085 blunder. What am I missing here? Is the idea that this is pretty close so I would probably get better use out of the free drop later? This seems like a pretty big blunder for this to be all that's going on.

It's the last opportunity to use the free drop, there won't be any more 4 away post-Crawford.

I think the reasoning behind the take is that if we drop here, we could be a bigger underdog the next game.

Thanks for the input. I'm not sure I understand your point about this being the last opportunity to use the free drop. If I take here (i.e., decline to use my free drop) and lose, wouldn't I be leading 6-5 (i.e., 1a-2a) post-Crawford and would have a free drop available then instead?

Yes you're absolutely right, my mistake.
I still stand by my 2nd sentence though.

In addition to keeping the free drop available for next game, there's another factor when the opponent needs 4 (or 6, or 8, etc.) points to win the match -- whether you lose more or fewer gammons than average. For example this position is a big take even though Black only wins 43% of the time, since he rarely gets gammoned. Of course this would be a huge pass when the opponent needs 2.



Similarly, you may have a pass at 52%, say, if you get gammoned more than average.

It typically doesn't affect things if your opponent doubles at the first opportunity since in that case, higher win % for your opponent correlates with higher gammon %, so it still generally makes sense to pass when losing and take when winning. But if they forget to double, it can affect things like if you make manage to make an advanced anchor as in the above position.