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BGonline.org Forums
OLM 20141102A The Prime Factors
Posted By: Igor In Response To: OLM 20141102A The Prime Factors (Taper_Mike)
Date: Monday, 3 November 2014, at 3:05 p.m.
The surprising conclusion in Advanced Backgammon is that you can take in a 5pt holding game with almost any race deficit. The close races combine race equity with shot equity, while the lopsided ones give the trailer an opportunity to keep his midpoint longer, thereby increasing shot equity enough to compensate for the reduced race equity.
Oh, Mike, I think we all know by now to not trust blindly all conclusions of pre-bot era books. In fact, nothing can be further from the truth and many 20pt holding games are passes. (For a recent work on the subject, check Stick's articles on holding games at GammonVillage and Stick's 300 holding game cubes package.)
Once the race deficit reaches 25+ pips (in a standard holding game, meaning the leader has only the 8pt made in the outfield), you need to start paying attention. In this case our race equity is starting to disappear, and we must rely on the shot equity. Because of that, the breakdown of single game wins/losses remains constant regardless of the race deficit once the deficit is large enough (usually 30+ pips). The only factor that essentially affects that breakdown is distribution of spares of the leader. Naturally, the more spares he has to play with, the less chance he has to leave us a shot. What makes larger race deficit into a pass (provided sufficiently many spares for the leader) is our gammon losses that grow with the race deficit!
This is my take on high anchor holding games after extensive analysis of hundreds and hundreds of rollouts I've performed over the past several months.
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