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Gammon rate in $ Games?
Posted By: Albert Steg In Response To: Gammon rate in $ Games? (Albert Steg)
Date: Friday, 10 July 2015, at 10:25 p.m.
The reason I ask the question is that I’ve often been surprised by the 20-25% figures I was seeing with regard to match play, because as my experience in heads-up money play has been so dramatically different. As people who have played me have probably noticed, I keep all my backgammon session — heads-up, tournament play, and chouettes alike — in a little pocket journal. Later on, I enter my results in a Filemaker database I built for the purpose, including a note of how many G’s/Bg’s won and lost (I don’t separate them out — they just go down together as ‘G’s). I’ve been quite consistent with my record-keeping, I believe — I circle gammons as they happen on my score sheets — inevitably, I may have missed circling a few, while I don’t imagine I ever circled any on accident, but I’m confident any recording errors would be trivial. So I can offer up some empirical figures from actual play. All of these were live in person -- no internet games included.
Looking just at heads-up $ play (no chouettes), with Jacoby rule, I’ve got: 20,102 games. Improbably, I still found someone who would marry me. Anyhow, 1228 G/BG’s won + 1108 G/BG’s lost = 2336/20,102 = 11.6%
In this large field of very diverse players, I had modestly solid winning results, winning 49.1% of games but 53.1% of points, coming out to .061 pts/game in average equity. (Stakes varied a lot, but average out to a net 22 cents per game, win or lose, which makes me feel a little like a pinball machine).
Of course, I’m not a robot, and neither are my opponents. So I was curious to look at some individual players I’ve played more often, as well as some other groupings, to see whether that rate varied much depending on opponent.
My most frequent opponent, Herb Gurland, I’m sure wouldn’t have minded my sharing our result: 5867 games. 357 G’s won + 333 G’s lost = 690/5867 = 11.8%
This is a great illustration that % gammons doesn’t in itself tell you anything about the relative strength of the players, or whether, per Bob Koca, above, it’s ‘better’ to have a higher gammon rate — because no one would mistake me for a ‘Giant of Backgammon’ like Herb was, and he earned an average .075 pts/game against me. In fact, discovering that I was winning substantially *more* gammons than Herb while also winning only 44% of total games helped lead me to the realization that I was in general both doubling too early (leading to excess G’s, but losing extra games) and dropping takable cubes (avoiding some G’s but also hurting my win %). Early last year I deliberately adopted a more cautious doubling & more courageous taking ‘default’ stance, and the results have been substantially, even profoundly, improved. (getting XG on my iMac has also been a help confirming these cube decisions after the fact).
My other two most frequent opponents, — alas, also stronger players than me (yikes — fully 50% of all my heads-up games have been against these three demonstrably stronger players) — both yielded gammon rates of 14%. Combined, we have 4254 games. 299 G’s won + 299 G’s lost = 598/4254 = 14.1% And holy shit, that isn’t an error — it’s 299 : 299 on the G’s won and lost! (206 + 93) : (215 + 84) !!!
Looking at everybody *except* those 3 players, I get 9981 games. 572 G’s won + 476 G’s lost = 1048/9981 = 10.5%
Looking at a category of ‘Other’ which includes a grab bag of people I haven’t played regularly enough to identify by name, and over whom I enjoyed a substantial advantage to the tune of an average .21 pts/gm, I see: 5917 games. 336 G’s won + 255 G’s lost = 591/5917 = 10%
Wondering whether BG practice over time might lead to a difference, I looked also at all my games Pre-2005 (11.1%) and post-2005 (12.5%) -- I didn’t play much at all between 1999 - 2005, so it's sort of '90's style vs 21st Century style.
(Incidentally, in chouettes I experienced gammons (won or lost) at a rate of 8.7%. This is low obviously because it doesn't include the many games where gammons occurred but I was not involved in them.)
So, while this is only one player’s empirical experience, it seems that in actual over-the-board $ play against a variety of weak and strong players, you’d expect gammons to crop up somewhere in that 10% - 14% range, and perhaps in a milieu of more ’serious’ players that might narrow to 12-14%. Or maybe ‘perfect’ opponents would come out a little higher even? 15%?
Albert
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