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Rice book reviews

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Saturday, 4 December 2010, at 2:05 a.m.

In Response To: Rice book reviews (Chuck Bower)

Chuck, you must have missed Stick's recent announcement that he added a review of Backgammon Openings to the book reviews section.

You didn't ask for this, but I'll give my opinion of Robertie's Modern Backgammon. It's a nice book, and I like very much the examples he gives. I confess, though, that I found the general concepts he gives (non-commitment, flexibility, etc.) too vague to be helpful. Some basic strategic concepts are critical for mastering any strategy game, of course. However, beyond a certain point, my feeling is that progress in understanding comes primarily through studying lots of specific positions, and not by coming up with new and very broad strategic concepts such as "non-commitment" which are hard to apply in practice. For this reason I think that books such as Woolsey and Heinrich's New Ideas in Backgammon and Ballard and Weaver's Backgammon Openings are much more valuable for improving one's game. They use conceptual language in their analysis, but the focus is always on concrete positions and not vague generalities.

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