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Speedgammon baffle box use

Posted By: Colin Owen
Date: Wednesday, 24 August 2011, at 2:34 a.m.

In Response To: Time handicapping (neilkaz)

With regard to potential Speedgammon events, Neil wrote: "Delay time could be further reduced with a relaxed cock dice rule and/or baffle box"

Surely he meant 'relaxed cocked dice rule'? Was this another of those Freudian slips we get on these forums? Or perhaps he's dyslexic.

Anyway, with regard to possible baffle box use in Speedgammon, to facilitate faster rolling, I did tests quite recently, to examine exactly this. The average time to roll dice using various methods was as follows:

Baffle box, no cup, no shaking 3.30sec

'Normal' rolling, a cup, 4 shakes 4.09sec

Baffle box, a cup, no shaking 4.18sec

Baffle box, a cup, 4 shakes 5.13sec

These tests took well over an hour, in total. I put the baffle box on the left and right sides. I chose 4 shakes as it's probably midway between the average and the generally expected minimum (three). I did the tests in empty boards, so the advantage of reduced cocked dice that baffle boxes can give was not factored in. I say 'can' because, with very thick chequers you get hardly any cocking, of course.

With a good baffle box the use of cups and/or shaking probably make very little difference (if any) to the randomness of the roll. To be on the safe side, cups should generally still be used with a baffle box, and shaking too. But in Speedgammon it may be appropriate to simply drop the dice into the box by hand. With 'standard' rolling straight onto the board, shaking IS important, of course. Policing players who try to cut corners to save time in Speedgammon is potentially problematic. So using a baffle box where no one has to shake the dice both solves this problem and is faster too.

Of course, some players have big objections to baffle box use, usually for aesthetic reasons. Personally, I have aesthetic (and other) objections to NOT using them! But that's another issue, not one of this post.

Henrik Bukkjaer posted on this matter earlier this year by the way, having used baffle boxes to great effect in Speedgammon:

http://www.bgonline.org/forums/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=90132

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