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BGonline.org Forums
Defending vs. a 1/3 backgame
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: Defending vs. a 1/3 backgame (Timothy Chow)
Date: Tuesday, 30 April 2013, at 3:08 p.m.
I've also been puzzled by the notion that the person playing against the backgame is considered the "defender." My guess is that it comes from the aphorism that there are only three game plans: attacking, racing, and priming.
As I see it -- and I believe you can find the same view in backgammon books from the 1930's and from the 1970's -- attacking, racing, and priming are the three categories of winning strategies going forward, but when those are not promising, the backgame is a fourth winning strategy, but "going backward." And so the opponent of the backgame player "defends" against the backgame player's strategy, just as the opponent of the attacking, racing or priming player "defends" against those strategies, by adopting whatever countermeasures will be most effective in thwarting those plans.
It's true that while carrying out any of the three usual forward going strategies entails countering the opponent's counterplan, it would be odd to therefore characterize the forward going player as a "defender." But I think that when the opponent adopts a backgame strategy, with many checkers back, this requires the forward going player to adopt extraordinary countermeasures not found in the usual three forward going strategies, and it seems to me that "defensive" suitably describes those extraordinary countermeasures.
Perhaps if you ask "how do you beat a blitz, a race, a prime, or a backgame" and replace "beat" with "defend against," the terminology will seem more reasonable to you as well.
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