Hi Phil,
Thanks for sharing another of your videos. Your well-delivered presentations are concise, easy to understand, and entertaining to boot.
I wanted to mention a couple of things, in case they help you in the future. More than once, it seemed that you cross-cancelled only the first two checkers on a point, when there were more (notably, on the 8pt or 13pt). You can cancel any same number. (I think the first time I noticed it, you counted 24 vs 8+2, when 16 vs 2 would have sufficed.) If I misunderstood, please disregard.
Have you considered (a) putting the darker checkers (e.g., blue) on the near side, and (b) placing the home boards on the left, so that diagrams are more consistent with the diagrams bgonliners more typically see?
I'd like to share with the bgonliners an interesting counting technique (either for totals or comparisons). Did you know that you can move 4 pips around the "wrong corner" and adjust the count by 20 pips? (It works because there are 24 pips on the board, and 20 + 4 = 24.)
For example, from the opening position, suppose I move one of Blue's 24pt checkers 4 pips in the illegal direction, around the "wrong corner." The resulting position looks like this:
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| XGID=-b--A-E-C---eE---c-e----A-:0:0:1:00:0:0:3:0:10 | |||||
4 pips around the "wrong corner" | |||||
Suppose we want to do a comparison count for the above position. Well, if we (mentally) move the 4pt blot around the "wrong corner" back to the 24pt, we achieve symmetry. Moving a checker (of either color) towards the far side counts plus, so Blue is ahead 20 pips.
In a similar vein, we can move one of the White checkers on Blue's 1pt (W's 24pt) back to Blue's 21pt (W's 4pt), which is another way of reaching perfect symmetry. Again, this 4-pip move around the wrong corner proves Blue is up 20 pips.
Let's have a look at the most complex position Phil showed in his video:
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| XGID=-ccBBBB-C---bC---c-bb---A-:0:0:1:00:0:0:3:0:10 | |||||
What is the comparative pipcount? | |||||
This count is is very fast. Just pretend you are moving double 4s -- the opposite way!
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Step 1: Grab the four checkers in the middle of Blue's home board (4pt+3pt) and move them 4 pips each to the 24pt and 23pt (towards the far side). The adjustment is +20 per checker, times four = +80.
Step 2: Move Blue's midpoint spare back to the 23pt, which is +10. Voila -- perfect symmetry!
The 80 from step 1, plus 10 from step 2, gives you a count of +90.
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Here is an alternate way of doing step 1: Grab the top two checkers from each of White's 24pt and 23pt (they form a 2x2 square) and move them 4 pips each to her own 3pt and 4pt (Blue's 22pt and 21pt). Again, that generates a count of +20 x 4 = 80, plus 10 (for mid to 23pt) = +90.
An alternate way of doing step 2 is to move 23/13 for White, the same 10 pips.
Mix or match. Technically, then, that's four different ways of quickly counting +90. Pick the one you like.
You can perform this trick for any distance between points: just subtract the number of pips you are moving from 24 to get the adjustment. For example, I sometimes employ the wrong-corner hop in Naccel, where the counting unit is 6 pips. Hopping 1 unit around the wrong corner is an adjustment of 3 units. (By the same token, if you've never seen this simple trick, try it sometime: when you roll double 6s, move one 6 around the wrong corner, and you'll have one 6 left to play.)
In this post, I chose to illustrate the wrong-corner trick with a movement of 4 pips, because it's an adjustment of 20, and counting in multiples of 10 (though IMO not generally fastest) seems popular.
Nack