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Containment play

Posted By: Stick
Date: Saturday, 10 March 2018, at 6:50 p.m.

In Response To: Containment play (Ian Dunstan)

Others have already followed up and addressed your problem. Still, I'll be somewhat redundant and post my own.

I give lessons on this type of containment. In those lessons we typically just play out positions similar to this and plenty of problems arise along the way. These are not easy positions to play out. I've played them out ad nauseam and still can find myself lost on any given Sunday.

Still, a couple things we'll pick up while playing out these problems is that points (more than 1 checker on a point) on the other side of the board should almost immediately be broken. The exception of course being our last ditch anchor which we often should leave as an anchor. The reason being it diversifies our long term coverage to a great extent.

This is even more true when our immediate coverage is already good enough as is. Your problem is a perfect example. Our immediate coverage is not too shabby. There are times when the opponent doesn't move at all, times where he doesn't move beyond our 6pt or 8pt, and times when he does hop into the outfield we still have solid double coverage + regardless of what natural play we make. Even on the rare instance where he hops out, we miss our double +, we need not panic. He still needs a miracle now to get by our second line of defense. Sometimes in backgammon you can win a game in one roll, here we can't so we have to play the long term game.

As to the ace in this position it is a rarity that we focus solely on blocking our opponent's big winning doublet. In order for us to do that the rest of our position has to already have excellent coverage and blocking said double really won't forfeit anything in that sense. Again, this problem is a perfect example of that. In general, I would say people try to block a big double too often in these types of positions seeing the short term gain of 1/36 rolls instead of the long term need to be split so be careful.

Stick

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