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BGonline.org Forums
Rollout (and where you've déjà vued it before)
Posted By: Stick In Response To: Rollout (and where you've déjà vued it before) (Timothy Chow)
Date: Wednesday, 12 November 2014, at 4:41 p.m.
From the DQR:
I've included this position from my match at FIBS. It is an excellent example about how to defend against backgames. I didn't bother with a rollout. I feel very confident that 6/1* 4/2* is the best play at any score. People have a hard time even seeing this type of play. (XG included, it wouldn't analyze this play past 1 ply, you have to push it through the filter for it to realize its worth) Once you've studied backgames seeing and even making this sort of play becomes second nature. What are you afraid of, that you're breaking a 6 prime and leaving 27 shots?! No ... what you're afraid of is that with any other play your opponent is able to make a second anchor and time his backgame.
What you're hoping to do in this particular position is get, I don't know, say 8 or 9 of your opponent's men back and then let the front of his position collapse completely. When your opponent has 8 checkers back and the other 7 of his men have all been pushed to the two point and beyond he has no game no matter how many anchors he has. He isn't at the front of your prime and has no real offensive position of his own so recycling your checkers in hopes of cracking his position completely so this type of prime breaking shot leaving play carries very little risk with it. The reward is big when you are able to make him crunch or even stack more of his men on the same inner board point, your 3pt in this position.
The other important aspect of this position that you won't get until you play it out a few times is how often you end up closing your opponent out and him having anywhere from 6-9 checkers that can only enter on your 3 point. At the score the power of this is lessened a bit but it's an important lesson for when gammons and backgammons do matter. Think of all the immediate sequences where you go for and easily achieve the closeout of those men. When your opponent rolls [66 55 65 63 53] this is the variation that is most likely to happen. You then cover two points and pound away easily. That's almost a fourth of all games!
I played this game out many times to see how it unravels. Below are a couple interesting positions I arrived at from playing it out and after that are 5 more positions showing how crunched my opponent's board was by the time I got close to the full bear in process. I took the latter 5 positions from the first 5 games I played out so it wouldn't seem like I was hand selecting the best to prove the point of my play. When someone finally puts out a book on backgames it will be very enlightening. That's right, we started off by breaking up our 6 prime and now I go one step further and I break my 5 prime! This is what Falafel would call real backgammon.
Stick
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