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Elaborating on Phil's Comments

Posted By: Paul Weaver
Date: Monday, 5 January 2015, at 6:35 p.m.

In Response To: 8th member of PR4.0 club--who else belongs here? (Phil Simborg)

I do not know the XG PRs of all the players mentioned by Phil, but I do believe I have a better idea about these guys than Phil does. These people who no longer play are smart enough not to waste their entire lives playing backgammon. Kudos to them for moving onto other arenas.

I will give three names Phil did not mention: Lars Bonding (DK), who probably played with a Snowie PR around 2.5 ten years ago, George Stephanopolis (a young Greek who lived in London ten years ago while working on his PhD, who may have been Raj's roommate and BG teacher; he played in few tournaments, but his online Snowie PR was well below 3.0) and James Colen, a Harvard Grad who played BG only a short time but made the Giants' List in 1995 and 1997 before making his fortune on Wall Street.

Most of those mentioned by Phil certainly would easily qualify for under 4.0 XG PR, but a very few of these guys are closer to 5.0 PR than to 4.0 PR. (I will not mention these names, although if you cough up enough ca$h, I could be persuaded.)

I have two or three old hard drives from my old computers seven to fifteen years ago. On these hard drives are thousands of GamesGrid matches and money games analyzed by Snowie. If you would be interested in spending the hours necessary to analyze these old matches by XG, let me know and I will try to send you the files.

Within the next month, I will try to get out these old hard drives and see exactly what I have, but this one fact I remember very well. I recorded hundreds and hundreds of matches and money games played by Nack between 1997 and 2005. I recall that in both matches and money games, Nack averaged in the neighborhood of 2.5 Snowie Error Rate, which is probably the equivalent of 2.7 or 2.8 in terms of XG PR.

It seems like three or four years ago someone published a list of recorded matches from the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, with Snowie ERs or XG PRs. To some extent, their PRs are findoutable (Google confirms I am not the first to use this word), provided we have enough data. I know that Walter had a collection of very old matches analyzed by Snowie with the ERs.

Incidentally, several of Charles Dickens' (a great English novelist of the 1800s) characters played backgammon, presumably without the cube. I have no idea how well they played back then, but it is a safe bet that today's top Brit (Raj is my guess) is far better than the players of Dickens' era. These guys would have to improve a bit to survive the Battersea chouette.

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