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Optimal Strategy against a better opponent

Posted By: Max Levenstein
Date: Friday, 29 July 2011, at 6:01 p.m.

I am interested in what the backgammon community has to say about the idea of "risky" strategies in backgammon against opponents that are better players.

I have been doing research in the economics department at UM this summer on risk behavior in win or lose games. Most of our empirical data has been drawn from NBA play by play, but I have been thinking about backgammon in the back of my mind the entire time.

The theory and mathematical model suggest that teams that are underdogs from the beginning of the game, or are losing in the game at any time during the game, should employ a risky strategy in order to increase the variance of the game. That is, using a risky strategy will expand the range of possibilities from losing with x % certainty to winning with y % certainty. A safe strategy, on the other hand would have a smaller range of x/y. Because the underdog or loser is favored to lose at the given time, and losing by any amount of points is valued with the same preference, the underdog would like to increase the variance of the game, in order to increase the chances of winning the entire game. This strategy will also make his chances of losing at a close margin smaller, but he should have no worry about that.

When applied to backgammon, I feel that this may also be an optimal strategy. Let's say I am playing in a tournament match against Stick, who obviously is a much better player and is statistically favored to win every match we play. Because losing a, let's say 9 point match, by 1 point or losing by 9 is the same (if you don't count my bruised ego), should I not be inclined to employ a risky strategy from the get go? This would mean not playing the checker play and cube decisions that XG says is right, because XG is assuming that my opponent is of equal strength! I might then be inclined to cube a little earlier, take a little later, and play more aggressively.

Perhaps this is old news and I am just rephrasing, but let me know what you think. Maybe players already employ this strategy, either conscious or unconsciously when they play better players (because, as JC said in Novi, Stick is a great player who hasn't won anything ;p).

Would it be valuable to have some type of modification on XG that would allow us to tell the computer that our opponent is a better player, or perhaps that he is a aggressive/safe player?

Max