| |
BGonline.org Forums
Raymond Kershaw's book, Backgammon Funfair
Posted By: Tom Keith
Date: Monday, 9 July 2012, at 12:50 a.m.
At Novi I had a chance to buy a copy of Raymond Kershaw's new book, Backgammon Funfair. (Peter Bennet announced the book on this forum a couple of months ago.)
The book was a nice surprise. It's not a standard backgammon book. It's a book of diversions, and puzzles, and mathematical oddities about backgammon. If you are looking for a book to improve your backgammon play, this is not the book for you (although Chapter 47, "Effective Pip Count," does contain the warning: "This Chapter is in danger of being useful.").
Most of the curiosities have been written about before, but many of the sources are so obscure that even though I think I'm pretty "aware" of backgammon literature, a lot of them were new to me. Kershaw dug up these unusual facts, organized them, illustrated them, explained them, improved them, and expanded upon them. Then he added a few of his own discoveries.
Here are some of the amusing, if not useful, facts found in this book:
1. In bearing off, you would think it is always better to leave one checker rather than two for your final roll. It turns out that's not always the case.
2. Double sixes is not always your best roll when bearing off.
3. There are some positions that have exactly zero equity.
The book has all sorts of little tidbits. For example, did you know that hitting four blots in four different quadrants with a single roll is called "picking a four-leaf clover"? And I was surprised to learn that only 0.389% of bearoff positions are gin (cubelessly) for one side or the other.
Ray obviously put a lot of work into this project. On the back cover it says "for several decades he has been accumulating much of the material for this book." You can get a sense of the range of material covered by perusing the Table of Contents, which I have compiled here.
In a few cases, I wish there were more explanation about the motivation for a puzzle. For example, Chapter 45 talks about "Count Down" but doesn't explain what that is.
Although the book is a little on the expensive side ($35), it is nicely bound, with good paper, and every page is in full color. It's a worthwhile read for anyone that enjoys looking at backgammon from a mathematical and logical perspective, and a unique offering in backgammon literature.
| |
BGonline.org Forums is maintained by Stick with WebBBS 5.12.