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rec.games.backgammon

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Monday, 14 November 2011, at 3:49 p.m.

In Response To: rec.games.backgammon (leobueno)

leobueno wrote:

I learned a lot from r.g.b., but after I discovered this forum it seemed pointless to participate in r.g.b.

Paradoxically, I think that the strength of r.g.b. is precisely that it does not have the aura of being populated by Giants. This has several consequences.

1. People are more likely to post more elementary problems.

2. People are less afraid to post honest responses because they're less afraid of looking like an idiot in front of the Giants.

3. People are more likely to take the time to explain basic strategic concepts rather than assume you're already familiar with them.

You can argue about why these shouldn't be true, but I've empirically observed that they are true. Not long ago, I posted a difficult "Checkerplay Challenge" here on BGO. I got almost no responses. I think it's likely that people were afraid to reply and look like an idiot. Had I posted to r.g.b., I'm confident that there would be at least a couple of people who would have given the quiz an honest try (without checking a bot first).

When I run into an interesting problem nowadays, I will make an assessment of whether it's more appropriate to post to r.g.b. or BGO. If it's an early-game decision or a score-based cube or some other complex problem that perhaps I still don't fully understand after analyzing it, I'll post to BGO. If it's a less advanced problem, I'll post to r.g.b. I will then follow up with a fairly detailed analysis of my own. I'm not so motivated to post such detailed analyses to BGO, for several reasons. One is that much of the BGO audience already knows that stuff. Another is that more often than not, I don't get any feedback on BGO (it's the old I-don't-want-to-look-like-an-idiot syndrome again). On r.g.b., if I say something that doesn't make sense, people aren't afraid to push back. And feedback is always useful regardless of whether it comes from a Giant.

Of course there are a few exceptions on BGO, which is what keeps me coming here despite the endless arguments about tournaments and rules and whatnot that are uninteresting to me 99% of the time. Still, I believe there's a niche for r.g.b.

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