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Grandmaster Award to Mike Senkiewicz

Posted By: Rick Janowski
Date: Friday, 19 August 2016, at 1:56 a.m.

GRANDMASTER AWARD TO MIKE SENKIEWICZ

I have the greatest of pleasure in announcing that Mike Senkiewicz, one of the great icons of backgammon, has been awarded the prestigious title of Grandmaster, by virtue of his excellent performances on the ABT backgammon circuit over the last 20 months. Mike has played at championship backgammon level over five decades and was listed in the original Giants List in 1993 in second place and has featured regularly henceforth. Mike was the top ranked player in 1995 and was again second placed in 1997. Besides being an extraordinarily gifted player, excelling in many mind-sports, he is also an authors and theoretical analyst of great renown.

Mike has achieved the title of Grandmaster (Class 3) with an aggregate PR score of 3.97 over 134 experience points. Mike was one of the very greatest of backgammon players in the pre-bot age from the late 70s through to the mid-90s.

Before the mid-70s, the absolute best players were playing at a level higher than PR 8. Paul Magriel with his modern and systematic approach to backgammon was the catalyst for improving the top level of play to about PR 6 by the mid to late 70s, but only for a handful of players. By about 1980, Magriel’s two protégés Jason Lester and Roger Low, together with Mike Senkiewicz, were playing at a level very close to 5, improving the level of play mainly through excellent cube play (most other players had cube PRs well above 10 at that time and for the next decade). By the early to mid-90s, before the first bots were released commercially, perhaps a handful of players were pushing the boundary to about PR 4.75. These included Mike, Wilcox Snelling and the late lamented Howard Ring.

Congratulations and Kudos to Mike Senkiewicz, who through his superb performances has deservedly reached Grandmaster level joining thirty-four other great players who have previously reached this level! This is a very fitting accolade for one of Backgammon’s few true geniuses!

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