Build your board

So if you’re up in the race, you should race… but what if you are down in the race?

When trailing in the race, it’s quite thematic to work on our board strength. 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 of winning is to hit and contain 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 aggressively slotting all 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. Even 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.

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The exception to aggressively slotting is if we have a reasonable expectation of getting our winning shot in the next roll. Consider the position below:

Here, Gary is extremely likely to leave a shot. If he rolls a 61, 62, or 63, he will be forced to play off the 15-pt, leaving us with a direct shot at the blot being left behind. We wouldn’t want our board to be vulnerable when this opportunity arrives, and so aggressively slotting here (either 6/4, 7/4 or 7/4, 5/3) is nearly a blunder! Instead, it’s preferred to quietly strengthen our board by making the 4-pt 7/4, 6/4.

We can adjust this position by keeping our distribution the same, but shuffling Gary’s around to make it much safer for him in the short term:

Here, all those shot-leaving 6s play nicely, and so Gary is unlikely to leave a shot (unless he volunteers it), and so now slotting aggressively becomes the right play again.

Next lesson: Don’t bury checkers