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Nactation: Clarity a problem for some readers, brevity an illusion for most readers

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Friday, 18 June 2010, at 2:30 p.m.

In Response To: Nactation: Clarity a problem for some readers, brevity an illusion for most readers (Christian Munk-Christensen)

Christian wrote:

How much will learning nactation improve one's game, Bob?

In terms of actual benefit to one's game, I believe that it exists, but that it kicks in only at the point where you're studying the openings seriously enough that you can't keep all your opening knowledge in your head at once.

A good example, taken from recent posts, is how to play a 4-1 after you've opened with 24/21 13/9 and your opponent has responded with a non-hitting roll. This decision has many similarities to the decision about how to play a 4-3 after you've opened with 24/23 13/9. If you're going to study this long list of positions carefully then it is enormously useful to have shorthand like 41S-xxx-43 and 43Z-xxx-41 to catalog everything. Otherwise it becomes very cumbersome to organize your rollout data and spot patterns.

The reason most people don't appreciate this fact is that they simply don't study backgammon that intensively. If you were to set yourself the task of learning how to play all third-roll positions in accordance with the latest bot rollouts, then you would inevitably develop some shorthand notation, whether it be nactation or some other system. Similarly, if you wanted to become a bearoff expert, studying thousands of positions and trying to remember all the subtle differences between them, you would have to find some compact system of notation to organize all that information.

If you're not inclined to study backgammon that intensively, that's fine. However it is silly to be skeptical of the value of nactation unless you've studied the openings with the same degree of thoroughness that the opening experts have and have found some other way of achieving the same level of mastery without any special notation.

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