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Position of the Day 03-26-24 - Cube - Rollout (Interesting, to me at least)

Posted By: Stick
Date: Saturday, 13 April 2024, at 7:01 p.m.

In Response To: Position of the Day 03-26-24 - Cube (Stick)

I was surprised at the size of the take here. Normally when your opponent has the best five point board and you're on the bar you pass these cubes at rapid fire pace. Here the opponent only has one roll where he can absorb his bad 3s, 4s, 5s. Immediately [55 44] and to a much lesser extent [33] are pretty tragic for the doubler. Also worth mentioning I think is that this is unlike those other positions in the amount of gammons it loses is relatively low. For the most part when we have 'a man on the bar v. the opponent's best five point board' I think we lose more gammons. It depends from position to position of course but generally speaking I'd expect that number to exceed 20%.

So normally, if I was still a backgammon player, what I'd do when the results are a little fishy to me, is I'd stick it into XG and play it out until my heart's content. So that's what we're doing here. I make a pointed effort to see how the game develops. After the game is over I physically type down anything I think was noteworthy in how the game was won or lost so I may be able to notice a pattern over many, many games that I wasn't aware of going in. For example, here are the results of the first ten games of my PFH experiment.

  1. won 16(!!) - hit a last ditch shot when opponent had 5 off otherwise I lose a gammon, all cubes obv came after hitting that shot
  2. lose 2 - miracle [61] for me after the opponent had escaped his back checkers
  3. won 2
  4. lose 2 - tossed [66, 66, 55] in the race and still lost bc it was hopeless to begin with and opp. tossed his own doubles
  5. lost 2
  6. won 2 - again hit last ditch shot when he had two off
  7. won 2
  8. won 2 - opponent escaped one checker but couldn't escape the other
  9. lost 2
  10. lost 2

    11. So as you can see, some things are more noteworthy than others. If I keep up playing this position out and noting the whens, hows, whats and whys hopefully I will internalize this position and be able to imagine how it and other similar positions will unfold in the future better. We can also ignore the outlier cube that could have went either way and see without that I'd only be down 2 points. A good reminder also of why a decent number of trials are needed before we draw any conclusions otherwise as of my 10 game result I should have beavered!





    White is Player 1

    score: 0
    pip: 107
    Unlimited Game
    Jacoby Beaver
    pip: 108
    score: 0

    Blue is Player 2
    XGID=-aa-BCDE---------aacbbbb-A:0:0:-1:00:0:0:3:0:10
    Blue on roll, cube action?

    Analyzed in Rollout No double Double/Take
    Player Winning Chances: 69.57% (G:13.42% B:0.14%) 70.01% (G:13.26% B:0.16%)
    Opponent Winning Chances: 30.43% (G:5.86% B:0.27%) 29.99% (G:6.03% B:0.27%)
    Cubeless Equities +0.466 +0.943
    Cubeful Equities
    No double:+0.649 (-0.080)±0.010 (+0.638..+0.659)
    Double/Take:+0.728±0.015 (+0.713..+0.743)
    Double/Pass:+1.000 (+0.272)
    Best Cube action: Double / Take
    Rollout details
    1296 Games rolled with Variance Reduction.
    Moves: 3-ply, cube decisions: XG Roller
    Double Decision confidence:100.0%
    Take Decision confidence:100.0%
    Duration: 19.2 seconds

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