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BuyOuts in Chouettes

Posted By: Robert Wachtel
Date: Saturday, 27 December 2014, at 6:21 p.m.

In Response To: BuyOuts in Chouettes (Phil Simborg)

Phil,

Our rule in LA (which I don't think we invented, though I don't know its history) is that the box has to pay the partner one half of HIS (the partner's cube). So in your example, he would pay the partner $50. Even at this price, we rarely have buyouts.

If I understand it correctly, your rule encourages extortion: it makes it rational for the partner to systematically object to any double the box wants to give. In order not to lose equity, the box would have to wait until every game he played with that partner was a pass! Only a terminally sick gambler -- whose illness you should not be enabling -- would buy partners like this out on a regular basis. And unless you had a few of these sickos in your game, you couldn't get through a single session.

Why doesn't this happen in every game in your chouettes? For example, if the box has a clear double that is worth .5 undoubled and .8 doubled, and the partner objects, the box would have to to forfeit .2 on each cube to buy the partner out, just to make the game look like ordinary backgammon! Of course you could kick someone who implemented this strategy as partner out of your chouette, or put social pressure on him for unsportsmanlike behavior, but isn't the purpose of rules to make these sanctions unnecessary?

In this example, though, with the LA rule, the partner would get exactly the .5 that his undoubled cube is worth, and the box would reap a .3 bonus for giving the cowardly partner the comfort of cashing.

Of course there is no magic number that covers every case: with our rule, the box can force the partner to go along with technical no doubles in the .5 - 1.0 range. Conversly, even our rule is very unfair to the box in volatile but low equity positions, where doubling is mandatory. The extreme of these are Jacoby paradox positions, where the correct action is double/beaver! It's clearly not fair to make the box pay the partner anything to implement the correct cube action in these positions.

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