In case it is not obvious, the 54R means 23/14*. I am no nactation expert, but I think that when the hit is obvious vs. the non-hit, R works fine though ambiguous.
What's that you say? There's no checker on the 23 point for the player who has yet to move? Well I assure you that there was. The initial board setup was incorrect and had the back men sitting there split. Nobody noticed and, well 23/14 is the obvious play, right? Still, nobody noticed. Now 61 is rolled and Bar/17 certainly seems right here.
Now, the player who started the game with a checker on the 23 point says "wait a minute, something's wrong here".
 is Player 2score: 0 pip: 157 | ||||||||||||||||
 |   | 5 point match | ||||||||||||||
| pip: 173 score: 0  is Player 1 | ||||||||||||||||
| XGID=-a----E-C--aeD---cAe----AA:0:0:1:61:0:0:0:5:10 | ||||||||||||||||
| to play 61 | ||||||||||||||||
eXtreme Gammon Version: 1.14
It is only 3 moves into the game. The applicable ABT rule reads as follows:
4.7 ERROR IN SETUP. An incorrect starting position must be corrected prior to the fifth roll of the game. Thereafter the existing setup becomes official.
Ok, so we need to fix it. How exactly do you fix this? Any thoughts?
The incorrectly placed checker has moved, and in a way it would clearly not have moved had it been in its correct position. Now if you say, just replay the rolls, does the player of 54 get to make his play with the knowledge that 61 is coming next? Because $ looks right to me then. Cancel the 61? Maybe, but the rule says nothing about cancelling rolls. Besides, what if another move had already been played and we now have 4 rolls completed? We're still prior to the fifth roll. The waters only get muddier.
Rarely am I so clueless in a backgammon situation. I know the rules and I have always felt I had good objective reasoning skills. But I had absolutely no clue here. In the end, we simply agreed to cancel the game and start over.
Calling all directors and wise men out there - what's the ruling?