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What Backgammon Needs to Thrive

Posted By: mamabear
Date: Thursday, 13 December 2007, at 1:50 p.m.

In Response To: What Backgammon Needs to Thrive (Stick)

I like the idea of clocks as long as the directors provide them. Most of us can manage our time adequately with the controls normally in use, and everyone benefits when the same slow players don't bog down entire brackets event after event. The expense isn't the issue, but there are other reasons not to say BYOC. Here are a couple:

1) Players only just barely trust dice and boards provided by opponents. Why would they trust an electronic device that for all they know, has been tampered with so that one player can slow down his side, or speed up his opponent's, with a remote control device? This wouldn't take rocket science to finagle, and would be hard to detect unless you already were suspicious and brought what you needed to check it.

2) Have you ever had to explain what a chess clock is to airport security? I did, and they held up the line quite awhile before someone was located who knew what it was. For this bear, never again! If I have to bring a clock to a tourney, if the event is not in whatever I consider driving distance that month or season, I won't be attending.

If the directors don't want to buy large numbers of clocks right away, a reasonable start would be for them to clock matches that are proceeding slowly, or that they know from experience will be slow. They hate to offend anyone, and I understand that, but slow players will not speed up just because someone asks them to. Some of them don't even know how slow they are, and a clock might just be the wake-up call they need.

Maybe the directors need to get together and agree on a year they will start aggressively clocking matches, to ensure that no particular director gets singled out as a "heavy". I don't think it would work that way, though. I think players would appreciate the effort to keep things moving, and the avoidance of long delays, more than they'd be offended if the director put a clock on one or more of their matches.

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