When up in the race, race

Even with all of this discussion about anchors, primes, and board strength, at its core, backgammon is a race. The competing priorities present in any given position can make it hard to see the forest through the trees. Oftentimes, decisions merely boil down to the race: if you’re ahead in the pip count, just run. Just as importantly, if you aren’t, don’t.

Consider the position below:

Gary has built a scary 4-prime with enough checkers to blitz your blot on the 23-pt. Thankfully, we’ve rolled a great running number which can not only take our lone backchecker away from enemy territory, but can bring it to safety on the 16-pt (23/16). Alternatively, we can use this roll to neatly clean up the blot on the 8-pt by making the bar-point (13/7, 8/7), which has the added benefit of blocking the checkers on the 1-pt. Which play should we make?

Looking at the pipcount, we lead by 6 pips before the roll, and 13 after it. As we are ahead in the race, we should lean into our advantage and just race by safetying our blot on the 23-pt. With a race lead, if we can manage to bring all of our checkers home while avoiding any contact, we are favorites to win.

Contrast with the following position, which is similar to the previous one, except we have moved two of our checkers from the 6-point to the mid-point:

This adjustment cost us 14 pips in the race, and now, instead of leading the race, we are trailing by 8 pips. We could still run, but that game plan doesn’t favor us anymore. Gary would love for each of us to quietly shuffle our checkers past each other this way. Instead, we want to hang back, prime him, and prepare for contact. Here, the right play is to make the blocking 7-pt.

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It’s quite thematic to work on our board strength when trailing in the race. Since we aren’t looking to break contact with our opponent, we want whatever contact we invite to go in our favor. Additionally, usually, our opponent’s checkers are advancing, which allows us to build quickly behind them by slotting.

In the next position, we are trailing by almost 25 pips:

Our only chance at winning is by hitting and containing one of Gary’s checkers. If we do manage to hit him, we want to make it hurt. To do this, we need a strong board quickly. We can build our board quickly by slotting all of the empty points, behind Gary’s checkers, where he can’t hit us: 6/3, 4/2.

This is what our board looks like after the correct play. Though it might feel dangerous to have multiple loose blots in our homeboard, our opponent is unlikely to leave us a shot next roll. If they do, we have many numbers that hit and cover one (2, 4, 5) or both (1) of the blots. The more likely outcome is that we have a 5-point board after the next roll.