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BGonline.org Forums
Two questions for strong players - why and how?
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Two questions for strong players - why and how? (DaveT)
Date: Sunday, 17 June 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
I don't know if I fit your definition of a "very strong player" but since I have been making a fairly serious effort to improve my game over the past few years, and have succeeded in improving measurably, I can offer my answers to your questions for what they're worth.
I wouldn't have gotten seriously interested in backgammon if I hadn't gotten a new job where many of my colleagues played the game regularly. Since I like strategy board games in general, that was enough motivation to lead me to read a few books (Magriel, Trice, Robertie) and get up to the intermediate level, where most of my colleagues are.
The motivation for getting past that stage didn't come until someone on rec.games.backgammon persuaded me to install GNU Backgammon and have it analyze my play. Until that time, I could kid myself about my playing ability, but no longer. The sense of horror and frustration as I reviewed my whoppers, some of which seemed blindingly obvious in retrospect, was a major motivating factor for striving to improve. Other bot features, such as the ability to collect my games in a database and compute statistics on it, also helped. Getting onto BGOnline and seeing the heights to which players like neilkaz could attain was yet another motivating factor.
What I've found extremely helpful for improving is the following principle: review the same material repeatedly until you know it cold. To a very large extent, backgammon is a simple game in the sense that in 99.9% of positions that arise, there is a fairly simple explanation for what the best play is. The main challenge is that there is a vast variety of different kinds of positions that can come up, and you get a more-or-less random selection in each game. So unless you have an exceptionally good memory, reviewing your errors on a game-by-game or match-by-match basis will probably not result in much permanent improvement. By the time the same kind of decision comes up again in another game/match, you'll probably have forgotten what you temporarily learned. So you need to review the material more than once to lodge it into your long-term memory.
How you review the material is a matter of personal style. I like to write down key positions in a notebook, and review them periodically. When I first write it down, I make sure to analyze the position carefully to come up with some justification for the right play. Then I move on to the next position. When I've accumulated enough positions that I have probably started to forget some of them, I rewind and look at the positions again. Chances are I'll get some of them right but make the same mistake I made before in some cases. Those are the positions I'll spend extra time studying.
Of course you also need to play regularly and not just study, because translating "book knowledge" into playing well over-the-board requires certain skills of attentiveness, concentration, and rapid calculation that can only be developed by playing an actual game in real time. But for most players, playing time isn't the bottleneck; it's study time.
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