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Eskgammon swing tournament test

Posted By: eskimo68
Date: Saturday, 14 December 2013, at 5:35 p.m.

We had a swing Eskgammon tournament at the end of September (been travelling so could not write any tournament report until now and this will be very brief for the only reason of getting the rules sorted out by smarter people than us :).

I'll post the rules we used in a separate thread, mainly because the swing rules can be used for normal backgammon as well. Back in the good old days several servers offered swing tournaments (basically everyone starts with the same amount of money, the ante goes up at regular intervals, new opponents are assigned immidiately from waiting players and when you are running low on remaining cash you can go all-in).

Because Eskgammon inheritantly has a lot of swings in a match compared to traditional backgammon this tournament format seemed to suit Eskgammon quite well (no pun intended). From the recorded tournaments 2/3 of players made it to at least one final (quite a lot of spread here). One player rose from being a pretty dead chip loser to winning the tournament (which frequently happens in swing tournaments when you get your luck roll in all your end matches). The most successful players played only twice as many matches as the least successful ones. This last point is actually quite valuable, this means travelling somewhere to play means you will actually get to play a fair amount for your stake.

All in all, every player was pleased with the tournaments. In fact, originally we were supposed to end the evening/night playing chouette but everyone wanted to continue with tournaments instead. And we had the usual Eskgammon weird luck situations like getting off the bar against a five point home 4-5 times in a row (it's less common than in normal backgammon). Or having three men on the bar and getting that lucky double that gets you out (usually also hits) and lets you win the match. And of course everyone's favourite, the opponent getting in from the bar with a lucky roll, hitting you and you dancing until the end of the game, starting with 2 times against the 6 point alone (do the math - this percentage is actually quite high compared to normal backgammon), 2-3 times against a two point home and so forth.

Just curious, has anyone actually tried Eskgammon outside of Scandinavia? Somehow I would believe there are people with suitable d10 dice and enough curiousity to actually try it but maybe rec.games.backgammon isn't what it used to be :D.

Eskimo