Hi!
Handling the opening well is a quite useful skill for every backgammon player. Once you've gone through the material on the subject you can try out your skills at the new opening reply challenge I have just added to www.backgammonstudio.com.
Each of the challenges on my server can be seen as a training program for the subject that it deals with. If there is a type of position that you don't feel that you master well you can take on these challenges to try to get a better understanding of what is going on.
The list of challenges that are available is growing:
- Opening reply! (couldn't think of a fun name for this...)
- Checkout! - bearoff checker play
- Slot machine! - double slotting
- Backgame checker! - backgame checker play
- Primetime cube! - prime vs prime cube handling
- Primetime checker! - prime vs prime checker play
- Bearoff bingo! - bearoff cube handling
- Bar brawl! - cubing from the bar
- Payback! - Pay now or later
- Hitman! - hit or not
- Backgame bliss! - backgame cube handling
- Borderline bonanza! - borderline cube action
There are also challenges for winning/gammon chances estimation, timed challenges (60/30 and 10 second time limit), pip counting in addition to a couple of timed versions of the above challenges.
It is easy to create new challenges based on the many action/position tags that the positions have been tagged with so odds are good I'll be adding more of these in the future. If you have an idea for a challenge please let me know and I'll see what I can do!
Many of these challenges are quite hard as they are based on errors made by top ranking players in international matches. You could upgrade your account and then upload a few of your own matches and play the exact same challenges using only errors you have made yourself in the past. This can be a great way to find out if your backgammon skills has improved since you made these errors or if there is still room for improvement! :-)
I also forgot to mention in the previous post that importing matches has become faster (nice if you have a private database and many matches to upload). And speaking of matches there are now 2647 matches in the public database.
Perhaps not surprisingly Mochy has by far the most matches in the database, more than twice the number of matches than the number two on the list Michy!
With the inclusion of the Backgammon Master Series tournaments several more players now have match entries in the database. So far:
- Backgammon Masters Series AT
- Backgammon Masters Series DK
- Backgammon Masters Series Iran
- Backgammon Masters Series JP
- Backgammon Masters Series UK
has been added with a few more to come. It takes a while to rename every file to the format MichyPoo and her transcription crew uses. It would have been sweet if XG could do this automatically.
You can go to 'Matches/Player overview' and then click on the 'Select country' button and select a country to get an overview of matches played by players from the selected country. So for instance for UK you'd end up with:
I thought I had made this premium as the query is a bit taxing on the server (you'll notice it takes a few seconds for the result to show up) but for now it is available to everyone.
I'd love to hear from you guys about what you think of the site, suggested improvements, bugs you come across, or anything else you think is worth mentioning.
Best regards,
TP