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"Erik Seidel Answers Your Poker Questions" - and two questions related to backgammon

Posted By: Daniel Murphy
Date: Sunday, 10 April 2011, at 8:35 p.m.

In Response To: "Erik Seidel Answers Your Poker Questions" - and two questions related to backgammon (zalan)

If we grant that Erik is kind of right that backgammon is "kind of a solved game because the computers know how to play it," I wonder, still: when did it become a kind of a solved game? Was it with the latest bot version? Or the one before that? Or the one before that?

I thought Erik's offhand remarks were only a partial explanation of why backgammon's best days are behind it.

For one, backgammon is a simple enough game that dedicated students can reach world class competitiveness in a few short years.

For another, as bot-aided backgammon has improved the standard of world class play and the numbers capable of reaching it, there's been no move to and little interest in adjusting the parameters of competition (format, match length) to reinstate a scale of advantage to ever-decreasing margins of superiority.

Third, the impact of backgammon programs has not been so much that they play the game expertly -- so do chess computers, but chess is still robust -- but that they're such an effective learning tool. They provide immediate and immediately useful feedback. With them, anyone can master opening play. Anyone can use them both to eliminate all sorts of small, frequent errors, and to identify errors in analysis that lead to less frequent but large blunders.

Finally, some of our discussions of "backgamon vs. poker" popularity seem poorly aware of just how much money is being lost and won in poker today. A handful of sites purport to track winnings in live tournament poker and in online tournament and cash game play. Such stats are mind boggling. Take a look:

From pokerlistings.com:

Biggest online poker winners, last 365 days:

# 1$1,602,008
# 100$128,898

Biggest online poker winners, last 30 days:

# 1$271,751
# 100$21,653

Biggest online poker losers, last 365 days:

# 1-$464,084
# 100-$97,370

Biggest online poker losers, last 30 days:

# 1-$184,597
# 100-$17,960

From world-community-poker.com, the biggest online poker winners, January-March 2011:

# 1$4,097,298
# 10$831,808

With regard to backgammon ever regaining its 1970s allure, I recommend this 1979 article in Sports Illustrated about Paul Magriel. Whether or not watching Paul play then was "a sexual experience," as Fran Goldfarb is quoted as saying, it's hard to imagine when SI might next devote an article to our game. Indeed, the last time was in 1992.

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