| |
BGonline.org Forums
A comment about the takepoint formula
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: A comment about the takepoint formula (Phil Simborg)
Date: Sunday, 18 April 2010, at 4:47 a.m.
Phil Simborg wrote:
But once you start adding a bunch of other checkers and contact and stuff, to make an intelligent estimate of which recubes that will be taken and recubes that will be dropped seems like a daunting, time-consuming exercise that isn't likely to be very accurate over the board anyway. So it seems to me that just knowing, as MCG says, how often you have an efficient recube is all you need to look at.
This is certainly the crucial question. I certainly don't have enough experience to speak for sure, but here is what I would say. Everything looks difficult when it is new and unfamiliar. Before you knew about takepoints and gammon prices and so forth, I'm sure you felt that trying to memorize all that stuff, and trying to estimate wins and gammons over the board, was going to be time-consuming and inaccurate. Why not just learn some reference positions and adjust by gut feeling? You can certainly get a long way just by doing that, and you're going to have to get by on intuition a lot of the time anyway.
I think you know how to respond to that question. It's true that you can get by for a while without biting the bullet. And that's probably the best way to get started. In fact, for the most part, I'm still at that level myself since I only recently started learning match play and I still have very little feel for how often I'll win a gammon, so knowing the gammon price isn't doing me much good (beyond knowing whether it's a lot higher or lower than for money). But I know that at some point, if I want to get good, I'll need to train myself to make those estimates. Furthermore, I know that with practice, it will get easier and more familiar and won't seem so difficult as it seems to a beginner.
The same argument applies, I think, to recube vig. You can get by with just trying to estimate "cube efficiency" in most cases. But I think that a deeper understanding of what's going on will require breaking down cube efficiency into its constituent components: How often do I get a recube? How often will it be a take, and how often will I still win after a take? Even if you don't plan to estimate these quantities directly OTB, I still think that these are the right questions to ask yourself when you study the position (perhaps playing it out interactively) and try to understand where the recube vig is coming from. When the bot says you get a recube 30% of the time and that 11% are takes and the takable recubes split about evenly, does that surprise you? If so, then it means you're not really grasping where the value of the cube is coming from. And if you don't understand where the value of the cube is coming from then you're not going to be able to estimate cube efficiency very well either.
| |
BGonline.org Forums is maintained by Stick with WebBBS 5.12.