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STic vs FT--Answer to "How fast"

Posted By: Phil Simborg
Date: Wednesday, 3 January 2018, at 5:16 p.m.

In Response To: STic vs FT--Answer to "How fast" (Michael)

I don't have the actual numbers to back it up, but I have seen the PR's of many giants who played speed gammon and their PR's are amazingly low.

I guess a small part of the reason is that Speed Gammon is generally shorter matches so there is not time wasted considering doubling windows and take points...most Giants know those cold for shorter matches.

But I suspect that, as I have written in articles, one thing that separates the Giants from the rest is the great library of reference positions and the ability to retrieve that information quickly over the board.

I am often surprised at how little math and how seldom Giants do calculations over the board compared to just making decision based on experience and reference positions.

Of course we can't generalize completely, because we have players like O'Hagan and Kit and Sax and others who I have seen going into great depth of thinking on the numbers and calculations, while others like Falafel and Victor don't do a lot of math over the board most of the time at all.

I even know a very top giant that doesn't know take points and gammon values half as well as I do (and most other open players) but still makes the right decision most of the time based on a good feel for how to adjust at certain scores.

I gave a backgammon quiz once to two teams: Steve Sax and Joe Russell proved to be far better than their opponents in coming up with exact take points and doubling windows and slaughtered their opponents in the quiz. However, in a match, I am sure that anyone would say that Steve and Joe would be about even money against the two Giants on the other side of the quiz (I won't name them because I don't want to embarrass anyone, but suffice it to say they were clearly two of the best players in the world).

I bring this up as another example to show why many Giants are able to make quick decisions well without doing much in the way of math or calculation, and again, in shorter matches these kinds of calculations are less necessary.

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