User avatar
admin
Site Admin
Posts: 343
Joined: Sun Oct 24, 2010 8:32 pm
Years playing backgammon: 20+ Learned to play on fibs.com playing bots and review with gnubg analysis FIBS rating 1750-1850
Location: USA

What's the plan #2

So here is a position where a mistake leads to the loss of a game. Playing White, leading 2-0 in a 3pt match and bringing home the checkers for a glorious victory when this 5-2 roll shows up
1.jpg
So as in the previous "whats the plan" example, I have a prime that I preserved past its useful life. I slot the ace pt (8/1) and it turned out to be a blunder (-.123)
Why is it a blunder? Because I don't want to get a checker hit. Even if I do have a full prime, it is close to being forced to crunch, whereas my opponent's prime is set up to improve over the coming rolls, which is exactly what happened.
2.jpg

Opponent rolled 11 and even though it was a lucky roll, my blunder of slotting the ace pt is what created the chance for my opponent to get lucky.
Once I got hit, it was all downhill from there. Got a second checker hit when my position crunched as my opponent's board improved.

So what's the plan? The plan at that 5-2 roll is to bring all our checkers home and not do anything stupid to kill our 92% winning chance. We are not trying to trap our opponent. We don't need a gammon. We just need a simple 1 pt win. The correct play is 7/5 7/2. Yes we break the prime because we don't need it anymore. The plan is to safely bear off our checkers. We facilitate that by good checker distribution and allowing the opponent a way out since we don't want them trapped inside our home board. The plan is to close out our board without leaving any blots. (gnubg switched the board position numbers around. it does that when the turn changes. Use the numbrs from the top image where White is on roll)

1. Cubeful 3-ply 7/5 7/2 Eq.: +0.858
0.929 0.291 0.001 - 0.071 0.002 0.000
3-ply cubeful
2. Cubeful 3-ply 9/4 8/6 Eq.: +0.842 ( -0.016)
0.921 0.360 0.002 - 0.079 0.004 0.000
3-ply cubeful
3. Cubeful 3-ply 8/1 Eq.: +0.735 ( -0.123)
0.869 0.383 0.007 - 0.131 0.013 0.001
3-ply cubeful
DOWNLOAD GREEDYGAMMON
No registration required!
Install and play backgammon against the computer!
Detailed how to installation guide with screenshots
Check out backgammonforums.com another nice bg forum

Return to “Position Analysis”