A happy little surprise that the error ended up being cut virtually in half compared to the XGR++ evaluation. I always used to leave the anchor too early in similar situations thinking that I wanted to be the first one in the outfield and wanted the flexibility and coverage. I still sometimes get it wrong, here for example, but after being dinged countless times I've got better I hope.
I really hated dumping a checker to the ace point here knowing at some point I would have to attack when my opponent tried to leave the anchor. I figured I'd hop both men into the outfield taking control of all that real estate and having flexibility to play either checker next turn to a better spot.
The flaw in my logic, though only a small error here thankfully, is that by staying on the anchor we cause a fair amount of havoc in how our opponent's numbers play. Also, it's not like our opponent can just skive of the anchor with any old six or four. If he does with certain numbers [65 63 54] he'd be running into trouble. Other fours are lame and wouldn't go anywhere anyway [42 41] So we have a lot less to worry about than my knee jerk reaction.
Another downside to hopping out is of course the shots we leave immediately of which there are four. [65 64] By keeping the anchor we force our opponent usually to play awkwardly behind us and then he will hardly have any ammo to cause us trouble if we do decide to run off the anchor with only one checker.
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| XGID=----BbDBB-C------bbbB-cbb-:0:0:1:54:0:4:0:7:10 | |||||
| Blue to play 54 | |||||
| 1. | Rollout1 | 10/1 | eq: +0.131 | |||
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| 2. | Rollout1 | 20/16 20/15 | eq: +0.110 (-0.022) | |||
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| 1 5184 Games rolled with Variance Reduction. Dice Seed: 54365086 Moves: 3-ply, cube decisions: XG Roller | ||||||
eXtreme Gammon Version: 2.10, MET: Kazaross XG2