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Position of the Day 09-04-26

Posted By: Chuck Bower
Date: Saturday, 19 September 2026, at 10:20 p.m.

In Response To: Position of the Day 09-04-26 (Stick)

Let's see if we can get a handle on this. Start with the race. Assume there are no hits the remainder of the game. What does the race look like? Two things enter besides the obvious current pipcount: 1) What is the wastage of the current homeboards, and 2) What is the impact of Blue being on the bar?

1) I use some of Art Benjamin's Ultimate Racing Formula methods to find wastage. Blue's is 10 pips (you can memorize this or use his Big Pippish formula to get 10 pips of wastage). For White, I use Art's 'Fastimate' where the wastage in pips is 4 + 2*(acept checkers) + 1*(deucept checkers) + 0.5*(3-pt checkers) + 1.2*(number of empty points). That adds up to 11.9 (let's call it 12. So far Blue gets a 2 point bonus, but...

2) Kleinman came up with the Hyperpip formulas (written up in Vision Laughs...). The most common adjustment (in pips) is for one checker on the bar: 2*S*(N + 1)/(36 - N*2) where N is the number of closed points and S is the sum of the values of those closed points. Blue gets penalized 6.5 pips here.

Combining 1) and 2) leads to 4.5 pips of penalty for Blue's race. However, as always since Blue is on the bar he gets another bonus of half the average roll ~4 pips. Thus the full race lead by this approximation is 9.5 pips. That's about a 10% lead so call this roughly 75% cGWC on non-contact race advantage.

Now what about contact? Blue gets {63,64} = 4/36 or 11% on the current roll. After that I'm not sure who on average is going to get the contact edge, but combining just this contact affect we get 4/36 + 32/36)*75% ~ 11% + 67% = 78%. (Note I did double count the hitting rolls as part of the race advantage, so subtract a percent or two.)

Right now this is looking like a solid double. We haven't yet considered gammons but with that closed board, Blue is going to get some, especially if he can hit before White gets those last two checkers off the 18-pt. (Two on the 18-pt plus one closed out checker vs. a perfect bearoff structure leads to roughly 50% gammons.)

My intuition when I first saw this is "how can this be a double?" but after the above exercise I'm doubting the Take. Still, I'm going to give my intuition a bit of credit.

Double + (close)Take.

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