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BGonline.org Forums
New backgammon book by Hickey and Storer
Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Tuesday, 3 May 2011, at 3:13 p.m.
Mary Hickey and Marty Storer have come out with a new book, What's Your Game Plan?. You can buy it for $45 from http://flintbg.com/boutique.html (and perhaps other places).
This is an outstanding book. I should say that I'm biased, because I helped with "beta testing" (but I have no financial interest in the book). But let me give you some concrete information so that you don't just have to take my word for it.
The book analyzes over 120 money-game checker-play problems, taken from real games. Everything has been subjected to XG 4-ply rollouts, usually at least 2592 trials. Another nice feature is that all the positions are collected at the front of the book so that you can quiz yourself on all of them without any spoiler hints or pip counts, before you turn to the main part of the book for the analysis.
What I believe makes the book outstanding is the quality of the analysis. During beta testing, I worked very hard to try to bust the analysis. Did Black miss a cube turn before the roll? Do the "explanations" hold up if we alter the position slightly (this is where I put in the most effort, trying to find variants for every position)? Does the analysis consider every play that a human might make, or only the plays that are near the top of the bot's list? If the position was taken from a match, but is now turned into a money-game problem, is the cube now in a logical location? I uncovered several bugs in this process and the authors worked hard to fix them all. Though some errors may still have slipped in, I feel confident that there are very few of them remaining.
How does the book compare to other books of this genre? The closest thing is Heinrich and Woolsey's New Ideas in Backgammon. Both books have about the same number of problems, address players at about the same level (advanced/open), and analyze each position with about the same level of thoroughness. I would, however, give Hickey and Storer's book the edge, not just because XG rollouts are more reliable than Jellyfish rollouts, but because they typically consider variants of the position to back up and quantify their explanations. Woolsey and Heinrich rarely consider variants, so it's hard to know how far their analysis can be generalized to similar positions. Hickey and Storer milk more out of their positions so you're getting more value per position.
Anyway, as I said, this is an outstanding book. It belongs in the library of every serious backgammon student.
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