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Positions and matches from Cleveland
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Positions and matches from Cleveland (Dmitriy Obukhov)
Date: Thursday, 5 April 2012, at 1:46 a.m.
Nice positions!
2. Looks like White easily has enough shot potential to take. If Blue rolls moderately big and White misses the shot, then it will be a drop. However, if Blue rolls small then I think Blue will not move his blot into direct-shot range, and White will then likely leave the back checker where it is, and it should still be a take. I'd be inclined to hold the cube here and just live with taking 2 points when we win.
3. I'd make the 3pt here. With White on the bar, the 3pt looks more valuable than the 10pt.
4. I'd reason that this might be a take but that the drop should not be wrong by a lot and I would drop. White has O.K. winning chances but I think gets gammoned too much since it's quite likely that Blue will make the 5pt and White will dance.
5. White needs 40% winning chances to take. Blue has two checkers stuck behind White's broken five-prime, but I don't think White has 40%. Is Blue TG? If White enters then I'm not sure Blue will still be able to cash. Plus, maybe I'm wrong and White has a take. My guess is D/P.
6. First let's look at our chances of winning or at least getting off the gammon by hitting a blot (or two). White has to roll a 1 for that to happen. If White rolls a 1 then we prefer to hold on to the 23pt, because then White exposes two blots instead of one (unless White rolls snake eyes, but even then holding the 23pt gives us better chances of winning). Now let's look at the risk of losing a backgammon. If we play bar/16, then 6 rolls get us off the backgammon (assuming we don't hit a shot). If we play bar/19 23/20 then only 4 rolls get us off the backgammon. So I can't see any reason to play bar/19 23/20. The alternative to bar/16 is bar/19 7/4. Then only 2 rolls get us off the backgammon if we don't hit a shot, but our chances of winning or getting off the gammon improve. Do they improve enough? This looks hard to assess. I'll go with bar/16 since the most likely variation is that we need to try to get off the backgammon.
8. I'm sure I would play 24/23(2) 4/3*(2) OTB. QF suggests that that's wrong, but I have trouble seeing the alternative.
9/10. This looks like an easy take and despite the score I don't think I would double. For the checker play, the double hit looks too crazy. So 6/3 is the 3 and we can either play 8/2* duplicating White's 2's and 4's to hit and cover, or 24/18 minimizing shots. I'd play 8/2* since it seems we still have a lot of problems to solve after 24/18 and I'd rather try to lock up the game quickly.
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