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What and Why?

Posted By: Stick
Date: Thursday, 19 January 2012, at 8:49 a.m.

In Response To: What and Why? (rambiz)

This is a tough one but I think I figured out mostly what's going on. I played out the play that everyone would make OtB, 13/12, a number of times to figure out what was happening. Here are first a couple points of interest:

  • Your opponent's gammon value is high at .70

  • Your opponent's backgammon value is way high at 1.5. You are far from off the backgammon after hitting.

Now, what is happening in the position. You want coverage. You want to control the outfield. You have no board and no immediate hopes of containing his checker. Your best bet is probably to try to build an outside prime of some sort after you spread your checkers and hit him when he tries to escape. it would seem that 13/12 would be the best way to do this and that would be wrong.

The problem with 13/12 is that your opponent is going to enter and enter high or even hop out now. When he enters high it is the most problematic as now you have the dual issue of trying to split your back checkers off the 22pt for coverage and minimizing gammons/backgammons lost and trying to safety the front checkers from all the indirect shots you left by splitting last turn. If you could concentrate on only the back checkers you would have awesome outfield coverage and no shots. He would come around the board, you'd probably get in some form a triple shot, and then you could start going forward from there.

When he hops out you may have more immediate coverage but once again, even if you do hit you've separated your army with no hopes of immediate containment as he'll enter immediately and be ready to hop and all your men will still be stacked on the 22pt. If you don't hit now you have to forfeit the coverage you could get by splitting off the 22pt in order to safety those two blots you just created to get off the backgammon.

I hope that was clear enough, any follow up questions fire away. The best way to understand a position is to play it out time and again until you see how it develops, not hit the XGR+ button and scratch your ass.

The conclusion after all this is that bar/20* 20/19 must be correct. Great problem.

Stick

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