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BGonline.org Forums
Gambling or Strategy?
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: Gambling or Strategy? (Timothy Chow)
Date: Saturday, 2 January 2010, at 11:32 a.m.
and to show that (with a bit of caricaturization) they could be viewed as coming from one camp or the other.
Well, all right then, 'cause I didn't think most of the rationales assigned to one or the other camps made much sense. Neither fast play nor slow play is inherently more "strategic" or "gambling," or has inherently more appeal to the "gambling" or "strategic" backgammoner. And backgammon is not a gambling game "or" a strategy game. Obviously, it's both. Solutions to perceived problems need to acknowledge that now-and-future players are attracted to the game because of various appreciations of its combination of gambling and skill.
My two cents on hand-recording and clocks is that of course they have not been introduced to make players play quickly, but to make the slowest players play at a reasonable speed. The most widely used time controls currently used barely do that; we surely don't need to make them more generous for all to accommodate the very few interested in hand-recording their own matches. I'd say the current time controls allot plenty of time for hand-recording. Personally I find it distracting, others say it is not for them, but no one argues that it's a time consuming task.
Looking over some of the reasons given with respect to Tad's original question, I don't see any that convince me -- if a player is going to be allowed to hand-record his own match -- that this needs to be done on his own time or before/after doing other things.
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