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BGonline.org Forums
Ready to blunder? - XG rollout and game progression breakdown
Posted By: Karol Szczerek In Response To: Ready to blunder? - XG rollout and game progression breakdown (Karol Szczerek)
Date: Monday, 6 April 2015, at 9:14 p.m.
I've played 23/14 OTB figuring out that the battlefield will be the outfield, so I want to have some presence there and probably build something in front of White's anchors. I've kept the anchor intuitively for safety.
I believe the reason the correct play looks so unintuitively and very risky is the fact, that such positions with many checkers back for both players happen pretty rarely. Much more common are positions with few checkers back and more builders in the zone, which calls for safer plays because of blitz possibilities.
Here, the key is to spot, that while White's board is strong, he has NO builders in the zone, and very limited reinforcements, so volunteering shots is much less of an issue. The key is to grab aggresively the outfield and staying connected.
I've conducted a short truncated hand rollout of 100 games to see what's the typical game progression. I've looked at the situation 5 rolls (that means 5 White's and 5 Black's moves) away and categorized the outcome into few groups:
a/ survived attack - White has hit and attacked, but Black survived, forming some sort of holding game good enough to easily take. In all but 1 of those games White wasn't good enough to double at any point.
b/ not surviving the attack - White is commencing the attack, and Black is dancing, holding no points or one deep anchor with many men back. Those positions are too good for White to double, or has been doubled and now he's a 70-80% favourite with massive gammon chances.
c/ hopeless - as above, but holding no points, and no real chances of winning. Those positions are almost completed blitzes.
d/ outfield battle - all cases where neither side isn't close to be good enough to double. Outfield holding games / battles with many points and blots wandering around and homes usually not improved or massive backgames for either side, etc. No immediate market losers.
The breakdown was:
a/ survived attack - 8/100 cases
b/ not surviving the attack - 11/100 cases
c/ hopeless - 1/100 cases
d/ outfield battle - 80/100 cases
This shows clearly, that the play isn't really risky at all, and most of the times leads to a non-volatile, slowly developing outfield battles. I've come to better understading of this position and the correct play starts to look natural to me, homever I'm far from accepting the fact, that my original play (23/14) was such a huge blunder.
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