On the 4th roll of this game we are at the door of a middle game. We have the advantage of having made his barpoint and dropped a builder on the 11; he has only dropped one man from his midpoint to his 8. Now he has 21 to play. He must quickly (pray and) build an advanced anchor of his own and make a board. Otherwise my advantage will increase from the present 60/40% plus more gammons (about 0.3 game equity) to the dangerous cube giving point when I will have more racing advantage or suffocate him by making a board or a prime. In some situations when moving inside my board is dangerous for him 6/5, 6/4 is the move, but here he can try both objectives - splitNslot (in spite of X22) 6/5, 24/22. Trying for an advanced anchor and peeping in my outfield and starting his first selfmade and most valuable point. Life is very short and there is no time... Sometimes splitNslot is forced, sometimes, as here, it is preferred partly because of opponent's racing (or other) lead when he would echew the complications of a skirmish a splitNslot offers. The need to split for him is so strong because in the next moves I will use all my dice to build and thus suffocate him. Every move ahead it will be more and more dangerous to split. If you knew how much he prays now for the Bulgarian anchor at least ! In the actual game he split to the 21 and failed to start his 5. As Kit said: he failed to do two things.
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