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| Board image courtesy of GO-Figure | |
Candidate Plays
- 24/21 17/15
- 24/22 17/14
- 17/14 13/11
- 24/21 13/11
- 13/8
I believe that's it for my candidate plays. (I did consider other plays, but these are the only plays really worthy of consideration imo)
Noteworthy aspects of the position
:> The race is even
:> Our opponent has more men back than we do
:> While we are outboarded our opponent is awkward. Hitting from the midpoint derails his last spare from there, hitting from the barpt will concede ownership of the barpt. Ideally he'd like to find a way to unstack his 6pt
:> We can't hope to attack our opponent as he has an anchor and there's nothing to attack. We can't exactly hope to prime him since he has the 4 anchor though with his suspect timing and awkward placement of checkers the mini prime could possibly cause some annoyance down the road. Our best bet at winning this game seems to scurry our checkers around the board
To come to the short of the long of it, I prefer 24/21 17/15 over 24/22 17/14 because it keeps our back checkers connected in our bid to race home. There's minor duplication involved with hitting 3s but allowing our opponent to unstack with 2s on our head isn't attractive.
I believe the gains in any play + 13/11 aren't enough to justify the extra blot. The builder is no great gain when we get away with it.
13/8 could be correct, and if I was feeling like a pussy that day I'd make the playing noting "if it's wrong, it's not wrong by much". It adds a useful spare to our 8pt, gives us some more flex, and keeps 5s duplicated. However, since this is Chuck's problem I'll pass up the temporizing play which is 13/8 and play 24/21 17/15.
Stick