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BGonline.org Forums
Long (rambling) story
Posted By: Chuck Bower In Response To: Rereading Advanced Backgammon by Robertie (Stick)
Date: Wednesday, 31 October 2007, at 4:34 p.m.
Question: who is more likely to make your Giant-32 ballot, Robertie or me??
I see. Pos 10 has only 14 checkers (on board) for White. It's more obvious the way you illustrated it than (I suspect) Robertie did. BTW, the first edition came out ~1983 and the expanded second edition ~10 years later. When I saw that there was a new edition out I was sure Robertie would fix the spelling of Edward O. Thorp's name. (He spelled it with an 'e' at the end.) Nope. I wonder if the mathematician had people beating on his door asking him to give back his Olympic medals.
I'm now even more surprised with pos 5. How does the splot play do? (24/22, 13/7, I mean; not 24/18, 6/4. Even Mary wouldn't try that. :)
Most of you probably know the story I now relate. Peter Fankhauser (who has reappeared on GoL after many years MIA) ran JF rollouts of the entire two volumes shortly after early JF (1.0?) became available. He asked Robertie for permission to post the positions from the book to go along with his rollout results. Fankhauser at the time was a subscriber to Robertie's (and Goulding's) Inside Backgammon bi-monthly magazine. Robertie was so incensed that someone would question the veracity of his book problems that he sent Fankhauser his subscription money back and refused to continue mailing the magazine to him. (I don't know how he feels about Bagai....)
Fankhauser went ahead and published his rollout results (online) without the position illustrations. I have a hardcopy (courtesy of Butch Meese) if you want to see it someday. I heard it is not longer available online, but maybe I heard wrong.
Stick, you see what those of us who took up the game pre-bot had to learn from. Consider yourself lucky not to have to unlearn all the bad habits many of the rest of us still suffer from.
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