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BGonline.org Forums
Paul Weaver Interviewed
Posted By: Phil Simborg In Response To: Paul Weaver Interviewed (Stick)
Date: Monday, 6 February 2017, at 7:09 p.m.
Stick, I think you make several valid points. One point I think you took out of context. I don't think Paul is saying that if Falafel and Akiko (if that is who he is referring to, as possibly Victor and a few others might not know every first and second move by heart) is saying that if they didn't make those opening errors their PR would go down significantly.
He made a point that by studying the first three moves carefully, and why you make those moves at different scores, you learn much about the game that will carry over into moves later on. I believe he has a valid point to some extent....the logic behind different 2nd and 3rd roll moves teaches us a lot about recognizing factors such as duplication and communication that will help your overall game.
As for the reverse split, my latest xg agrees with you, and not with Paul, about that play, but it is close and I'm not about to predict what a future rollout might say. I think the point isn't so much which of those two is right, but the logic of what Paul said, about cube efficiency, is a good lesson. I teach players to make different opening moves at post crawford when your opponent has a free drop for a similar reason.
As for Ed O'Laughlin belonging on the giant list, since the list is not supposed to be just about PR and about results, I think that in view of Ed's performance, and his past history, he belonged on the list, and certainly far more than many on that list. If you are saying that Ed may not have one of the top 32 PR's in the world, that could be true...but we don't have enough data to prove or disprove that, and PR only proves how well you can play against the computer and very top players, not necessarily how likely you are to win tournaments or money, and I believe the Giant list is more about that.
As for who in backgammon plays the best table tennis, I think that here again we don't have clear rankings. I still guess that Gus is probably better at table tennis than any other regular backgammon player, but he probably never competed professionally in table tennis...and though Senk was ranked in the top 100 (I am told), I have no idea how good some of the others mentioned were. My Russian friend, Efim Lieberman, claims to have been one of the top players in Russia when he lived there, for example.
Like you, I played tennis for many years, and I have rarely known a fine tennis player that wasn't also very good at ping pong. And we know there are some really fine tennis players in backgammon (Gus and Corbett probably the two best.)
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