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BGonline.org Forums
bearoff blues #1 - double1s
Posted By: Albert Steg In Response To: bearoff blues #1 - double1s (sebalotek)
Date: Sunday, 27 January 2019, at 9:01 p.m.
Well, your concern is obviously that you don't want to get hit, so you need to assess both the immediate risks of leaving a blot on your next roll, and also the persistent risk of leaving shots on subsequent ones.
The first thing that should be worrying you is the gap on your 3-point and you should immediately look whether there's anything you can do about it. A gap that's lower in your board is going to be more of a problem than one higher up because it will persist longer, until you clear all the checkers behind it. So 5/3(2) immediately jumps out as a likely candidate since it pushes the gap up to the 5-point. 4/3(3) 3/2 is worth looking at too, but the gap stays lower and it stacks both spares on the 2-point, which is the worst place for them to be, so, probably not.
So if you have a couple candidates, you should check how many immediate rolls will leave a blot. You just have to do the work and count. I like to just walk down the mixed numbers from top to bottom and then add in the bad doubles: 5/3(2) yields 65, 61, 51, 66 and 44 = 8 bad numbers, while the other play yields 65, 62, 54, 51, 42, and 21 = yikes, 12 bad numbers, 4 of which leave double blots!
At that point I'd double check to make sue there aren't any other attractive plays --have a look at 6/4(2), maybe look at 5/4 5/2 . . . it's easy to overlook plays so you want to be thorough.
It looks like for both immediate and long-term safety, 5/3(2) is much better. Decisions are harder when you have an option to leave several more immediate shots to buy better long-term safety, but this one looks clear.
A general checklist of factors I'd want to think about when bearing off against contact:
--Immediate shot-leaving rolls --Longer-term structural safety (avoid gaps, have spares on middle-points) --Crashing your opponent's board (there's some value to holding your top two points here as 4's and 5's that don't escape will break his board) --Opponent board strength (is getting hit a disaster, or does it just give up gammons?) --Bear-off speed (when a gammon is close)
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