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6-away/2-away cube

Posted By: Jim Stutz
Date: Sunday, 25 June 2023, at 7:35 p.m.

In Response To: 6-away/2-away cube (Timothy Chow)

The leader is gammon-shy at the score and saddled with three big positional problems: 1) Two back checkers still stuck on the 24 point; 2) He hasn't made any points anywhere; 3) His opponent has built The Rack.

But 6-away is going to have to play this position out if I take the cube as 2-away, and it's almost always harder for human players to avoid errors when playing offense in contact positions rather than defense. (This argument has been made before, I know, but I think it bears repeating.) Even top players are much more mistake-prone than XG when prosecuting relatively complex attacks when gammons are at a premium. As the leader I figure to make, on average, fewer and less costly errors defending this attack than my human opponent will make prosecuting it. When in doubt, I take these cubes as the defender, and I’m taking this one.

So, given a contact position where gammons matter and one side has the clear offensive initiative, is there any objective evidence out there that supports the opinion that human players tend to leak more equity playing checkers on offense than on defense? I would argue that a comparison of XG evaluations of such positions at different settings support this conclusion in most cases.

For example, run Timothy’s position here through XG at 4-ply and then run it again at XG++. 4-ply leaks close to half a blunder’s worth of equity playing checkers on the attacking side compared to XG++. Meanwhile, XG 4-ply plays its checkers better than any human player (and WAY better than the average open-level player), especially when on attack in contact positions where gammons matter and blunder potential exists. Therefore, on average, human players will leak even more equity playing offense here – quite a bit more, I would argue -- than the ~half a blunder’s worth that 4-ply leaked vs. XG++. Of course there are exceptions, but if you believe this to be generally true, as I do, then even a solid pass per XG++ becomes a take by the leader against human opponents in this class of position.

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