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BGonline.org Forums
Only Herb Roman Got All 4 Right
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Only Herb Roman Got All 4 Right (David Rockwell)
Date: Saturday, 3 April 2010, at 9:02 p.m.
David Rockwell wrote:
It was too difficult to explain to first time players.
I haven't ever played with the Holland rule but I can imagine that this would be a pain in the neck.
A lot of classic games are burdened with "special rules" that seemed to be a good idea at the time but that, in the long run, have proven to be more trouble than they are worth. People who introduce rules generally seem to underestimate the nuisance of having special rules. Chess has a bunch of these. Chess should really end with the capture of the king. The checkmate rule complicates the rules without much benefit; among expert players it makes essentially no difference whether the game ends with checkmate or with the capture of the king, and among weaker players it only eliminates a few "accidental" wins at the cost of significantly increasing the difficulty of explaining the rules to beginners.
In backgammon the Jacoby rule seems to be a good example. Among non-expert players it probably does prevent many people mistakenly playing on for the gammon when they should just cash, but among experts it's just an inelegant special rule that provides no benefit.
In my view the Crawford rule is just barely worth the added rule complexity it introduces. But I would not be too upset if it were to be abolished. The Holland rule doesn't seem worth it to me. Comparing to chess, I'd say that the Crawford rule is akin to castling and the Holland rule is akin to en passant.
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