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Playing under 2.0

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Tuesday, 12 February 2013, at 4:32 p.m.

In Response To: Playing under 2.0 (Matt Cohn-Geier)

I'm not sure what Stick meant by money, but what I was talking about was not a one-time shot at $1 million. What I meant was for there to be enough money for backgammon to be a sustainable professional career.

A good reference point is chess. The top pros earn six figures and can be fairly confident of maintaining that income level for many years. If they make it to World Champion then they're looking at seven figures. This means that there's enough money for a large pool of people to consider seriously taking up chess as their lifetime occupation, providing enough income to raise a family and send the kids to college, etc.

If there were as much money in backgammon as there is in chess, and if climbing to the top were strictly correlated with PR, then the pool of people who would then take up backgammon full time would increase enormously. Give that large pool of candidates ten years, or possibly even five years, and I think that someone would break 2.0, according to any plausible definition of that term.

To guarantee that this would happen, though, I'd estimate that at least $20 million in prize money would be have to be guaranteed every year for the next 25 years, and it would all have to be handed out based on PR rather than conventional scoring.

Or to put it another way, if I were given half a billion dollars to work with, I'd be prepared to give 10 to 1 odds that I could produce a sub-2.0 player within ten years.

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