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Tennis + ... Backgammon?!

Posted By: Stick
Date: Wednesday, 27 January 2016, at 1:27 a.m.

I was patiently waiting for someone else to post about this so I could drown them with my own personal brownie points. Alas, nobody did so I'm left to do it myself.

Last night I stayed up (no surprise) to watch the Federer/Berdych quarter finals match of the Australian Open. Due to the enormous time difference (14 hours), the matches start late to really late here. I believe the Fed/Berdych match went on around 11pm EST. A lot of the matches come on at 3am. The Aussie Open is what caused me on top of bg in San Antonio last year to get roughly zero sleep.

Anyway, watching on ESPN2 the backgammon commentators were Brad Gilbert, Patrick McEnroe (John's brother), and Darren Cahill. At one point Federer hit a fairly crushing inside in forehand. An inside in forehand is basically a forehand that you ran around, instead of hitting a backhand, and instead of going cross court with your forehand (big angle) which is the common shot, you pull it up the line. For an example see this point between Federer and Nadal. It's how Fed ends the rally. The music in the video sucks, best to mute it if you watch more.

When he did this in the match they started talking about Fed's footwork. How he put himself in a position to get lucky. One of the commentators related this to backgammon and said noted that it's the same concept. The better players seem to be luckier because they put themselves in a better position to get lucky.

Later on, that was maybe in the beginning of the second set, they put up a poll somewhere asking what more fans thought Federer could secretly be. (or something to that effect) There were three choices, only two that I remember. One was a Rubik's cube master and the other was a backgammon genius. Out of the three backgammon genius won the vote with 41%. I tried to screenshot it with my phone but it wasn't on the tv long enough. Perhaps someone with some slick Googling skills can find it online.

I don't know about anyone else but here's to hoping that if Fed ever does retire he turns to bg. I've got dibs on trading lessons with him.

Stick

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