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BGonline.org Forums
Zero equity opening plays
Posted By: Kevin Whyte
Date: Friday, 5 August 2011, at 7:58 p.m.
I've been trying to get my gaming friends to play some backgammon along with other games. One of these guys has a "thing" about first player advantage, and insists on using the "cake cutting" approach to balancing games. If you haven't run into this before, it means one player makes an opening move and then the other decides which side they want to play. I like it for chess as a way to get some less usual openings (and because the first move it big there). I'll put up with it at go although I definitely prefer just using komi. I'd never considered it for backgammon until this guy insisted. I wouldn't want to play this way all the time, but it was an interesting exercise to try to find ways of playing the opening rolls that were as close to zero equity as possible. Here's what I think I played (there was a lot of beer involved):
21 : 21Z (24/23, 13/11)
31: 31U (24/20)
41: 41T (13/8)
51: 51R (24/18)
61: 61T (13/6)
32: 32T (13/8)
42: 42R (24/18)
52: 52T (13/6)
62: 62R (24/16)
43: 43T (13/6)
53: 53R (24/16)
63: 63$ (13/4)
54: 54$ (13/4)
64: 64N (13/7,8/4)
65: 65N (13/7,8/3)
As a side benefit, this gave me the opportunity to practice nactation on some less normal plays. I think I got it right on most of them, but I'm not sure if it should be 41D or 64& (or 65&) and I may have mixed up some of the N and $ plays. Also, R for 24/18 seems to work, but it feels weird to me to call that running. Looking at the list now, I suspect many of these plays are too good - I find it hard to guess how suboptimally I need to play to get to around zero equity. Anyone else care to guess? I'll probably check with a bot before I play him next, and I'll post the results here if there seems to be interest.
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