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BGonline.org Forums
Genuine choices
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Thank you (Rich Munitz)
Date: Tuesday, 15 September 2009, at 5:17 p.m.
In the end, I don't know that I'd call it psychology per se, but there are game styles that you play well or like to play or which you think will likely make life more difficult for your particular opponent and a 0.01 error that steers the game to such a variant will reap longer term rewards to compensate.
Along these lines, let me propose a definition: a genuine choice is a choice between two (or more) plays such that (1) the equity difference between the plays is small, but (2) the plays are likely to lead to very different types of games. It would seem to me that an important skill for expert play is the ability to recognize genuine choices and to exploit them to steer the game into a direction that maximizes the chances of one's opponent's future errors while minimizing the chances of one's own future errors.
Among some top players there seems to be a strong, almost obsessive, concern to minimize one's error rate. While an obsession with error rate has some benefits, there is some danger that it will obscure the value of developing one's ability to recognize genuine choices and to exploit them when they come up.
One genuine choice that I recall from Backgammon Boot Camp is a backgame-like position where one has the defensive 4- and 5-points and has the choice between making the defensive 3-point and breaking the 4-point to hit and strive for a kind of two-way game. It would be nice to have more examples. A collection of carefully selected genuine choices is a very interesting book that has yet to be written.
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