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Speedgammon baffle box use

Posted By: Colin Owen
Date: Thursday, 25 August 2011, at 3:08 a.m.

In Response To: Speedgammon baffle box use (neilkaz)

With regard to your surprise (at my tests) that a baffle box and no cups is not as fast as you thought, I think the following is worth posting:

1) The box I used for the tests is a Simborg one that has four slopes or baffles. I have three other baffle boxes that have two or three slopes. Three slopes is by far the most common of the ten or so baffle boxes that I've seen over the years. His box will therefore take a fraction longer for the dice to emerge.

2) My baffle boxes tend to evolve (some might say mutate!) with frets placed judiciously that deflect the dice - but rarely cock them: Phil's box is loaded with them! Again, this will very slightly delay the dice (compared to most boxes that have few or probably no frets).

3) I used the large (5/8") precision dice in the tests. I should have used the medium, really. (I slightly prefer the bigger sizes with a baffle box, but go with my opponent) In fact, here in the UK at least, the small precisions are the most popular. Particularly with frets in a box, bigger dice take a fraction longer to pass through.

These three factors combined, probably easily lost half a second to the 0.8 second advantage I found in my tests. This compared a baffle box with no cups/shaking to conventional rolling with 4 shakes. But the average player surely shakes the dice at least a little more than this (especially the mean rather than median). At at least 0.2 seconds per shake, it's significant. For all these reasons I think that Henrik Bukkjaers' belief (stated in a 23 Feb. post) that the baffle box/no cups combination saves 1-2 seconds per roll is possibly conservative.

A very good reason for using a baffle box (or Meyer Dice Tube) in Speedgammon is, of course, that the players are rolling into the same area. With standard time controls this can give a worthwhile advantage to the player rolling into the outer boards; but it's much more significant at Speedgammon.

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