To get a sense for how the game will play out, Stick recommends playing it out interactively. This may work for him and for others, but I've never been a fan of it because there's too much luck involved with the dice. It's like doing a rollout without variance reduction. Instead, I've found GNU's temperature map feature more useful. Your mileage may vary.
To each his own but the positions I recommend playing out the most are normally somewhat near the end of the game. I recommend these because it takes time to play out a position enough times to get a good sense of it. The closer the end of the game you are the shorter amount of time it takes to play out.
I play out positions over and over and over again all the time. In playing them out not only do you get in my as always not so humble opinion a much better understanding of the position but you come across interesting decisions time you hadn't expected. You learn not only why you didn't understand the original problem but you are presented with more problems for analysis.
You can only get so much mileage out of a temperature map. For example, as recently posted on Facebook by the American Backgammon Tour (Bill Davis):
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| XGID=-eeeEEE-------------------:1:-1:1:00:0:0:1:0:10 | |||||
I've played this position out more times than you want to know. This isn't one I'd even recommend playing out, this is for the pure bg geek. It takes quite a while to play out a game and the bot's analysis is completely worthless. You have to figure out how to play it out yourself. I loved playing it out and have learned a lot. I play it out me v. me whereas most positions I play out me v. computer. I don't play XG here because it has no idea what it's doing after it gets hit with the checkers or the cube.
What is a temperature map worth here? Absolutely nothing. What is playing it out worth here? A lot. An extreme example for sure but the point is you can't do the inverse - show me a position where the temperature map is worth something and playing it out is not.
One needs a lot of free time to play out positions and then review them and then play them out again and then review them but it has to be by far the best way to understand a position and in the long run will help you understand way more due to the other problems that will arise along the way.
Stick