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BGonline.org Forums
Ten Things I Hate About the BG Experience
Posted By: Barry Silliman In Response To: Ten Things I Hate About the BG Experience (Randy)
Date: Tuesday, 28 October 2008, at 9:31 p.m.
Hi Randy, sorry if it sounded like I was picking on you. Anybody who cares enough about backgammon to read here and post here is by default my friend. :-)
The ability for an average bear to beat a world class player is what many players find so attractive about the game. But skill wins out in the long run. If you look at the ABT first place winners here, http://www.bkgm.com/features/HallOfFame/ , you'll see that only one name appears in the First Place column more than once and you may have heard about that guy. The sharks at the top of the food chain will get their share but they'll only drive themselves crazy if they don't realize the fish are going to get their nibbles too on occasion!
Generally speaking, I believe I read or heard years back that world class player Kit Woolsey said his expectations are to win 60% of his matches. I inferred from this that 80% of the matches were a coin flip for a 40-40 split and that he'd win the remaining 20% by superior skill.
When in a prior post I shared my Zen-like perspective with Stick and told him not to expect to win more than 60% of his matches over the long haul, even he essentially agreed with that! (I must have caught him in a weak moment). Even though he expects to outplay his opponent 100% of the time.
To relate a true fish story, we had a club player for a few years who was just absolutely awful. This person showed absolutely no capacity to improve at the game. This person won about 10% of their matches over a few years. This person never did grasp the concept that after winning the Crawford game they should double right away post-Crawford and would play out the remainder of the match with a centered cube. Despite this, this person beat, twice within one tournament, in both the main and the consolation bracket, a pretty decent player in the Baltimore-Washington area who has cashed at the ABT Open level. I won't name names but thankfully the victim wasn't me. We still like to rib the victim at times about this!
Anyway, it would be interesting to see what other player's take on luck is. My general, non-scientific, non-logical, completely random saying is that any game with dice is 80% luck.
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