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The Art of Beavering

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Saturday, 19 February 2011, at 5:38 p.m.

Despite the importance of beavers in money games that allow them, I've never seen an article devoted to studying close beaver/no-beaver positions. There is of course an obvious reason to doubt the value of studying "reference positions" for beavers: If your opponent doubles you when you have a beaver or a near beaver, then, barring a Kauder paradox, you are "operating far from equilibrium" (as a scientist might put it). That is, if a bot rollout says it's not quite a beaver, then in practice it might be a beaver anyway since your opponent is apparently a weak player who will fritter away more equity later on.

Nevertheless, I think that there is value in knowing where the line between beaver and no beaver technically lies. This information gives you a baseline from which you can try to make adjustments for differences in skill.

So, suppose you are redoubled in the position below. Do you beaver?

		White is Player 1 score: 0 pip: 38 Money session Jacoby Beaver pip: 40 score: 0 Blue is Player 2
XGID=-ACCB-----------A----dcfa-:1:-1:-1:00:0:0:3:0:10
White on roll, cube action?

Messages In This Thread

• The Art of Beavering
  Timothy Chow -- Saturday, 19 February 2011, at 5:38 p.m.
  • The Art of Beavering
    Casper van der Tak -- Saturday, 19 February 2011, at 5:59 p.m.
  • The Art of Beavering
    Stick -- Saturday, 19 February 2011, at 6:00 p.m.
  • The Art of Beavering
    Matt Cohn-Geier -- Sunday, 20 February 2011, at 12:00 p.m.
    • The Art of Beavering
      Timothy Chow -- Sunday, 20 February 2011, at 5:25 p.m.
  • Rollout (and XG bug?)
    Timothy Chow -- Sunday, 20 February 2011, at 8:11 p.m.
  • The Art of Beavering
    ah_clem -- Monday, 21 February 2011, at 4:08 p.m.