Hey all

Yesterday I attended our weekly club gathering where we had a small tournament and played some handicap games for beer.

A new player (later refered to as fish but with no degrading intent) ask me to spot him the opening roll in a 1-point match (DMP) for a beer. For the safe of fairness I kindly declined and offered him the opening roll including doubles and I still think I was a small the favorite.

I won the first game and lost the following two. Then another player offered to spot the fish TWO opening rolls including doubles!... again for bear (and yes we did have a few before this happened ). After the shark lost the first game he wanted to get a little back and suggested that the starting position was as on the picture below, still giving the fish two rolls including doubles.



Now people get interested because it certianly isn't clear weather getting the 23-point is a bennefit or not. We argued for quite some time and never really reached a conclusion.

Meanwhile the fish took a break and we began to discuss how he was surposed to move 21 as his first of the two rolls. As an old school player I had no doubt in my mind that slotting 5 and 4 was correct by a huge margin. Nobody thought otherwise. the fish came back and rolled 21. He thought about it for a while and moved 6/5 13/11. At this time we were having sidebets on the games and I had picked the fish this game and complimented him for slotting at all. It's a friendly game and such comments are considered ok even though they were still playing.

Later we put the 21 into Gnu and to our big surprise it favored 6/5 13/11 over 6/5 6/4!

Now, here are my questions to you:
1) If you were to spot two rolls including doubles would you rather have the normal opening position or the one on the diagram above?
2) If you were the fish and you rolled 21 in your first roll, how would you play it and why?

1) Maybe I misunderstand the question, but there is no way this position is better than the regular position for black. Backgammon is a race, and you're already down a bunch in the given position, with no offense and less tools for constructing offense. In fact, as black, I'd probably rather have the regular position + no spotted rolls than this one + 2 spotted rolls. I am assuming the "fish" is playing as black here, but maybe I fail at reading comprehension.

2) I'd play 6/5 13/11 (not just because gnu said to). The sooner we slot the better here, and I'd rather focus all my energy into making the 5 point than hoping we get either the 5 or the 4 made. If you double slot, your only immediate builders to cover are all on the 8-point! After the single slot, you have a ton of ways to make the 5.

In the position above the fish has the white checkers so he will be moving twice to begin with. One of the reasons for accepting the "backgame" as the shark is that when white has the first two rolls you might find yourself behind a prime pretty fast. This is a 1-point match so you can't lose gammon. If you are able to achieve and maintain propper timing you would have at least decent chances, imo.

Personally I'd prefer the original starting position, but there were severeal strong players around and this problem split them in half.

Ah, okay. Sorry it didn't make sense to me before. That being said, it's a lot of work and luck to get proper timing for a backgame, and I think you're definitely right to prefer the original position.

Against a "fish"....i dont think black is much worse than even money from this position. If i could get something like +150 on a bet....i would take that all day long.