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BGonline.org Forums
New Bulgarian Fish World Champion! + Match File
Posted By: Stick
Date: Sunday, 2 August 2026, at 11:40 p.m.
Congrats to Petko! Third time in the finals and finally the backgammon gods were on his side. On XGR++'s first run through analysis Petko played a flat 4 and Jason played a 4.4. More on that later, stay tuned.
As some of you undoubtedly noticed, I had to delete my first posting of the match wrap up. I input the wrong match length, 17 points instead of 19. Tragic. It was easy changing the match to 19 and then reanalyzing but I had to redo the rollouts too. (and delete all the postings on other forums/Facebook) So let's try this again, round 2, ding ding!
First, the Match File. This also includes a lot of preliminary rollouts which means to 1296 trials, default XG settings, but a lot aren't to stat sig. If it was near the end of the game I tossed in more trials because it's so quick. I rolled out plays that were close, or I was interested in, or the players OtB took time with. If there was already a big difference in plays I obviously didn't bother with a rollout. I also didn't roll out any of the first three moves as they're generally rolled out already.
Next nugget of interesting information, the WBC Wikipedia Page was updated to reflect Petko winning almost instantaneously. Kind of crazy.
On to over the board notables. Pack played with a baffle box, Petko rolled old school. Thank you Petko, it helps both to watch and input the match when both players aren't using the baffle box. Petko has a good shake and let's say a slightly overly strong tumble of the dice onto the board. He cocked his dice a lot. Maybe something left to work on with his game. Time wise it didn't matter, it was a shortened match with all the gammons happening. Each player still had over 20 minutes left on their clock when it ended.
I didn't watch the match live and when inputting the match I was either watching YouTube or listening to music so I only turned on the commentary when something visibly happened. At one point Petko makes an illegal move. I was watching it at 2x speed while inputting so didn't catch it so when Petko tossed his hands over Pack's roll I had to pause and rewind to figure out what happened.
I'm not trying to give Justin a hard time. (or maybe I am since he's not here anymore) He's a great commentator yada, yada, yada. But when this happened and I turned on the sound to rewatch and figure out what was happening I had flashbacks to watching poker streams where the announcers just kept yapping when something interesting was happening at the table. All you wanted to do is hear what was being said at the table but they were rambling on about generally about nothing pertinent to what was happening. It's a bit different with backgammon of course since we can't normally hear the players but still, stay on point! Both commentators immediately think that a die didn't go through the baffle box and that was the issue. So they note it, dismiss it, and Justin forges on with his likes, subscribes, and Galaxy advertising. Once they figure it out you'll also notice in the video Pack's clock continues to run. Harmless ultimately in this instance but something to remember for when it happens to you.
After my preliminary rollouts Pack is playing a 4.4 and Petko a 4.2. Now I move on to pure speculation. I know Petko's game well enough and in his post match interview he mentioned that a friend told him 'not to worry about the error rate ... sometimes you have to make adjustment decisions'. I believe there were two cube decisions where Petko passed knowing they were takes and one time he held off on cubing knowing it was a double.
Of the two passes, one is game #4 where Petko is ahead 15a 17a and the other is game #11 where Petko leads 5a 12a. The first position is definitely gammonish and the second is gammonish enough. Those are the sort of cubes one would adjust on against a weaker player.
As for the cube I believe he held off on, it's game #10. Watching the video you actually see him consider it and I read the look on his face as 'I know I'm supposed to double this but ...'. If we remove those three decisions from his errors his PR ends up at 3.05.
If you input those three positions and load up the Jacobs staggered match equity table (50 elo aka ~1.5PR difference) then two of them become correct and the last one is still an issue. Take all that for whatever you want. Only Petko knows if and when he adjusted.
We all know whoever gets to the end of such a tournament is going to have some good luck along the way and including the final match if the PRs are close. In this match while watching I was forced to notice Petko winning a gammon, then winning a gammon, then amazingly saving a gammon, then winning a gammon, then saving another gammon, then winning a backgammon for the match. Pretty sick.
Stick
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