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BGonline.org Forums
Further thoughts on backgammon psychology
Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Saturday, 19 January 2013, at 3:35 p.m.
Recently I suggested that when choosing between two close plays of widely differing character, it is good strategy, especially in a chouette, to choose the play that is more likely to get your opponent steamed. A natural question is, "Well, O.K., but which play is that?"
One of the most fundamental, ironclad facts about backgammon psychology is this:
Everybody thinks the bots cheat.Well, O.K., not everybody everybody. Regular readers of BGO would never dream of thinking such a thing. But you know what I'm saying. The #1 FAQ for any strong backgammon program is, "Does it cheat?" But since the idea that the bots cheat is so taboo among the cognoscenti, most of them don't think too hard about why this belief is so pervasive, and whether it reveals an exploitable psychological weakness.
This #1 FAQ/fact is IMO a very fruitful source of inspiration for ideas about backgammon psychology. Here I will make just one suggestion. One thing that gets the fish really mad is when the opponent makes a seemingly reckless play and, instead of getting justly punished for it, instead gets some "incredibly lucky" rolls and cruises to a sensational victory. So, if you are a shark, you should deliberately steer for this scenario if you can.
But can we get quantitative about this? I'd suggest that as a first approximation, the above insight is that high-variance plays are to be preferred to low-variance plays. By a "high-variance" play, I mean a play that causes the equity of your opponent's rolls to be very spread out—your opponent will have many jokers as well as many anti-jokers.
Just how much equity should you be willing to sacrifice for the sake of high variance? I don't know; this is something that requires further experimentation. My intuition is that it will almost never be worth intentionally whoppering for the sake of high variance alone. But where the precise threshold is will depend on a lot of things. Importantly, you must be alert to your own sensitivity to wild swings of fortune. You must not think that just because you pray to the bot five times a day and always give alms—I mean tips—when you win, that you are immune to the weaknesses of the unwashed masses. He who lives by the joker, dies by the joker. So if you are prone to getting steamed yourself, don't try this at home. But if you are a Job who can calmly face all the vicissitudes of life and say, "The Lord giveth; the Lord taketh away: Blessed be the name of the Lord!"—then you're robbing yourself if you don't exploit your psychological edge.
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