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My story (long), plus the short answer
Posted By: Matt Cohn-Geier In Response To: Most efficient way for learning backgammon? (Stick)
Date: Saturday, 12 May 2007, at 1:17 a.m.
The short answer: play bots and other strong players. Read books. Read forums, obsess about backgammon. Bot recommendation is GNU (or Snowie, if that suits you better), book recommendations are Magriel's Backgammon, Trice's Backgammon Boot Camp, Robertie's Advanced Backgammon and Modern Backgammon, Woolsey's Cube Encyclopedia, Storer's Backgammon Praxis, and Woolsey's New Ideas in Backgammon, in roughly that order.
My story: in a little more than a year's time, I've gone from Completely Inept to Fairly Decent Player. I played backgammon with my friends and family once upon a time, and I knew that you were supposed to make your 5 point with 31 and bar point with 61, but nothing beyond that. Actually counting up pips (or worse, rolls) was a completely foreign concept to me.I played a few games against the computer program MaxGammon, and started becoming interested in backgammon. After just playing it for awhile I began to develop some skills, simply through repetition. It had huge problems with its RNG, though. It was decidedly non-random. I searched around for various websites. Backgammon Galore was the best of these, and after reading for awhile, I felt like I could actually understand what was going on, the ideas involved in a backgammon game, and so on.
Eventually I found the Jellyfish 3.0 Demo. Jellyfish was a whole lot better than MaxGammon. I played against 0-ply a lot. I read a couple books which weren't very good (the only one I can remember was Robertie's Backgammon for Serious Players, but maybe I also looked at Jacoby's Backgammon Book). I read Magriel's Backgammon, which was excellent. Now I really felt that I could recognize most concepts of a backgammon game, although I still had problems applying them. I had big problems with more complex games when there were several conflicting goals and prioritizing among them, and often made huge blunders in these situations. But I understood the strategic concepts involved and that it was all part of a game plan. This appealed to my chessic nature. Chess was a good game, full of intricacies and beauty, but it was also frustrating and demanding as hell.
Somewhere around this time, the local club showed up to play a chouette while I was playing chess. I have no idea why they decided to change venues for a day, but I watched them for awhile, although I didn't want to play--the way they played, they looked like they would eat me alive. They explained the concept of a chouette to me, although I didn't understand it. It took until I had played in a couple of chouettes to really understand what was going on. I read Advanced Backgammon (vols 1. & 2), which is to date the best book on backgammon that I've read. Now I was absolutely possessed. I had to know more about the game. I hungered for backgammon knowledge.
I found the Snowie Demo, which was even better than Jellyfish, and started playing against that constantly, even though it beat me mercilessly. I started playing on online sites, Yahoo, GE, PG, etc. Eventually I found gnubg, which remains my bot of choice. I read a few articles by Kit Woolsey, which were very clear and well-written, and joined GammonVillage. I read 501 Essential Backgammon Problems, Backgammon Boot Camp, Classic Backgammon Revisited, and the Cube Encyclopedia by Woolsey, which were all pretty great resources. I joined the local club, and found that I could actually play an okay game of backgammon (time from first playing MaxGammon to date: about 5 months). I was pretty nervous when I first started playing IRL, but I calmed down eventually. I joined GammOnLine and read the forums and articles there. I read Backgammon Praxis (excellent), Modern Backgammon (excellent), Backgammon with the Giants: Neil Kazaross (good), Boards, Blots, and Double Shots by Wiggins (good), Understanding Backgammon (decent), Tournament Backgammon by Woolsey (mediocre), Can a Fish Taste Twice as Good? (too math-theoretical for my taste), the MatchQiz series by Woolsey (decent), Vision Laughs at Counting vol. 1 by Kleinman (okay, but disappointing), and New Ideas in Backgammon (excellent).
Since then, I haven't read any more books, just more forums and articles. The largest factor in my development has been playing bots and simply getting maximum backgammon exposure. Repetition and recognition are big parts of the way I approach things. That can work against me in unfamiliar positions, e.g., I find it difficult to estimate winning chances in crunch positions. But it seems to have worked out well so far, for the most part. My results have been decent.
I'm not really sure where to go now. When I was training for chess, I constantly did 1) tactical problems, and 2) game analyses, either those of GMs or those that occurred in my own games. There were FAR more than enough chess games to do those until I died of old age (on the order of, let's say, 5 million tournament games). That's not the case in backgammon, because players generally don't record their games. I'd like to analyze my own games, but collecting them is hard, since most of what I have is playing bots. I cashed out after the legislation, and have started trying to play on GG, but I'm not really into it yet. It's difficult to psychologically create tournament conditions when you're playing on a computer. I'm open to suggestions, though.
I had originally intended to have a longer answer to learning methods (how people learn in general, what conditions one ought to create in order to learn), but this post is running long enough as it is.
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