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BGonline.org Forums
ABT Dead Cube rule needs revision
Posted By: Kevin Whyte In Response To: ABT Dead Cube rule needs revision (Barry Silliman)
Date: Wednesday, 10 August 2011, at 5:43 a.m.
If you are interested in a comment from a newcomer to backgammon, here it is (if not, stop reading). I have been to tournaments for several games ( mostly go, a reasonable amount of poker, some chess) but not yet for backgammon. One thing that seems to be present at all of them is the debate between the "gentlemanly" group and the group that believes in doing whatever is legal to increase their advantage. I have played chess players who fiddle ("adjust") their pieces constantly in an attempt to distract. I have played against poker players who act out of turn regularly to get a reaction. I have seen go players hide their prisoner pile to mislead their opponent about the score.
Overall I'd say that this sort of gamesmanship is common and mostly accepted at poker, although maybe on it's way out. At go it is almost universally disliked, but where exactly to draw the line will provoke debate. Chess is somewhere in the middle.
To be candid, I should admit that I hate this kind of thing. I also think it is unfriendly to new players as it sets an environment where anyone and everyone might being lying to you or somehow playing an angle. Can you trust what another player tells you when analyzing a game, or are they just setting you up for next time?
So, I'd hope that:
1) Very few people would sink to doubling their opponents at, say, DMP just on the off chance they weren't paying attention.
2) If they did, the rules and other players would side with who I'd call the victim here, and try to prevent such nonsense.
Who does it benefit to allow these tricks? People who can occasionally pick off a match by doubling an opponent who is focused on other things and drops what is an automatic take ats? Is it really a good idea to have a mechanism in place to let the new/tired/old be exploited in this way?
The last is not a rhetorical question. I've had these discussions more than once with poker players and the response, especially from the older generation of players, is that the professionals make most of their money from such fish and that letting them do so is the only way they can play the game full time. It's not an impossible model - new players are mostly chewed up and exploited for what they will pay before they stop playing, and this bounty goes towards funding the experts who can then try to advance our understanding. Quite frankly, it's not so far from how I support myself as a research mathematician by failing people at freshman calculus. However, in none of the cases is it a good way to attract new people to join the field.
To condense this nonsense to shorter sense: why would you want the rules to allow for the leader to double post-Crawford in the hope of a drop? It only works against inexperienced and otherwise distracted players, so allowing it discourages those groups - is backgammon in a position where penalizing everyone who is new or who must carve time for tournaments out of their sleep schedule a good thing?
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