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Naccel 2 -- post #2

Posted By: Nack Ballard
Date: Monday, 11 January 2010, at 2:34 a.m.

In Response To: Naccel 2 -- post #2 (Andreas)

Does Naccel 2 also use special procedures/tricks if all checkers were already in the homeboard ready for bear of or do we here just adding memorized known cluster formations?

My article in 2001 included a lot of intraquadrant formations called "squads"; these are handy for bearoffs, though they also arise in other quadrants as time-savers.

However, the joy of Naccel is in harnessing the geometry of the board (quadrants of 6 pips each arranged in a 2x2 formation) to achieve lightning counts, and in using superpips to transform large numbers into small numbers.

Using Naccel to count the bearoff certainly works (and you may as well if you're using Naccel to count non-bearoffs anyway), but this should probably be the last phase of the game to work on as far as improving your counting.

For reference, when your checkers are grouped around S0 (same as n0, the trad 6pt), it is very fast to use reflection as a cancellation technique. Once your checkers are all (or mostly all) in the home board, squads take over and you can either continue counting to the trad 6pt as S0/n0 or you can change your S0/n0 to the bearoff tray, whichever is closer/easier. (The bearoff tray continues being S-1 or n-6 if you don't switch).

How to handle cases were checkers already beared off?

I assume: subtract 6 for each in the final calculation.

Checkers borne off count -1 each. That is, rather than count each as -6 pips, count each as -1 superpip. In essence, the bearoff tray is a fifth Super labeled S-1 (and to be clear, that reads "S negative one").

You can actually bear off checkers as part of shift-counting, even in the middle game. For example, consider a blot on n16 (trad 22pt) and two checkers on n-5 (trad 1pt). n16 is shifted to n18 which is S3, and the two on n5 are moved to n-6 which is S-1 ("borne off") to compensate. The net count of these three checkers is 3 - 2 = 1.

Nack

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