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US Open Conso Finals recube decision
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: US Open Conso Finals recube decision (asasan)
Date: Friday, 21 May 2010, at 4:50 a.m.
Sasan, congratulations on your -- ChiPoint says you won that match after that double and Neil's redouble! -- on your 2nd U.S. Open 1st Consolation finish.
Playing lesser opponents, I do sometimes adjust my cube action and, very rarely, my checker play for the purpose of provoking a cube error.
But making those adjustments well is, for me, difficult. Doubling early droppers early and late takers late is easy enough, but adjusting doubles and takes for a perceived difference in strength which translates to an accurate estimate of adjusted doubling windows -- that's difficult and, it seems to me, likely to lead to bigger mistakes than making cube decisions as if I had an equal opponent. I could be very wrong about the difference in skill, and I could be very wrong about how much that difference should affect my cube action.
Playing better opponents, I'm even less sure of deviating from the book. Perhaps that is in part because I overestimate my chances against better opponents. But three thoughts occur to me:
(1) If I deviate from the book against a better player, there's an even greater chance, compared to playing a lesser opponent, that I have wrongly estimated the difference in skill and how that should change my cube action.
(2) I'm reluctant to overrule what I think are "correct" decisions without knowing, rather precisely, when the skill difference makes "incorrect" decisions good ones.
(3) I think it would be a lot of work to elevate my game enough to judge skill and differing windows with the precision I'd like to have before making adjustments. That time would be better spent simply improving my play, and if I weren't as experienced as I am, I think it would be really tough to learn to make those judgments, and the possiblity of making huge mistakes by not playing "correctly" would be even greater.
We all make mistakes throughout a match. They all cost us equity. But sometimes it really is possible, and right, to point to one key decision we made that, as it turns out, cost us the match. Matt recently wrote about his thoughts and the time, and his thoughts and feelings afterwards, about a redouble in Cyprus. I sympathize. I once lost a 17-point match on a 16 cube to an opponent who was surely not as good as me. It was a bit funny how it happened. The score was 3-1/17 or so when I doubled to 2. My opponent redoubled to 8. After an argument about the cube size, which I lost, I took the cube -- I was favored to win the game! Later I redoubled to 16. I no longer have the position, but I did think about it at the time, and I'm pretty sure now that it was a double and a pass for an equal player and for that opponent. Even so, I was pretty irked at the time to have a 17-point match end in 15 minutes, and I still remember the incident now, seventy-eleven years later. And whether my double was correct or not, I'd sure rather have sat on the cube and won the match, then to have doubled and lost it quickly. On the other hand, such positions spice the pages of our backgammon newsletters with some frequency and, perhaps oddly, I get some comfort from the idea that if I were a better player a 16 cube in a 17 point match might have happened in my matches more than once.
My strategy, then, when playing a better player, is simple: I make the best by- the-book decisions I can, and hope the dice favor me. Partly because it's hard to make correct adjustments, and partly because, if I've gotten to the final or consolation final or even just past the first round, there's a good chance that I'm nearly as good as I sometimes think I am.
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