FAQ

What does __ mean?

The definitions to nearly all backgammon terms can be found at the Backgammon Galore Glossary.

Where can I play backgammon online?

  • The top site today is Backgammon Galaxy, on which all the top grandmasters in the world play. The platform is beautiful and has a website and an app. It’s completely free, including analysis, but the downside is that it has a gamecoin-based system, so if you run out of coins (by losing too much) you need to wait 12 hours for more, or you need to buy some.
  • The next most popular is Backgammon Studio Heroes. It has an infinite number of features which makes it intimidating to navigate, but it’s free to play. It’s invite-only to join, however, is kludgey on mobile, and analysis is a paid feature.
  • An up-and-coming site is OpenGammon, which is being furiously developed and has new features like puzzles and achievements. It’s completely free to play and to use high-level analysis. It plays excellently on mobile, and the board can be completely customized. It doesn’t have as many users as the other major platforms though.
  • Another prominent platform is Backgammon Hub. It’s sponsored by the UKBGF and features a very stable and clean interface. One thing that sets it apart is that it has more tournament-focused features than the other platforms. It’s mostly free, allowing up to 50 free matches per week.
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  • dailygammon.com is a website where you can play “correspondence style“. It’s from the early 2000s (with an interface to match it) but it’s fairly active.
  • bgtrain.com is free and is just for solving puzzles.

Where can I find more people who like backgammon?

What intro book should I get?

In terms of “Intro to Backgammon books,” the gold standard is Backgammon by Paul Magriel. This book has long been considered “the bible” for backgammon players, and although many of the ideas in the book are out-of-date1, it is still a must-read today. It does the best job of defining the major game plans and terms in use during play today.

More modern introduction books are Michy’s Opening Concepts, Marc Olsen’s From Basics to Badass, and Bill Robertie’s 501 Essential Backgammon Problems. Each of these books has a completely different style, so browse through them however you can and choose the one that suits you best!

Recommended books specific to cubing are: Marc Olsen’s Cube Like a Boss,  and Kit Woolsey’s The Backgammon Encyclopedia,

(Buying any of these books using our Amazon link helps support our website. Thanks!)

What’s the best backgammon software?

There are 3 established backgammon desktop programs:

  • GnuBG (free) has a very strong AI, but is positively ancient.
  • eXtreme Gammon (XG) ($60) is considered the gold standard in terms of its AI, but also hasn’t been updated in a decade. Also it’s Windows only.
  • BGBlitz ($23 or $46 depending on license) is modern, is actively developed, and runs natively on every OS. It has a slightly weaker AI than the other two (though notably still stronger than any human).

At our current stage, any strength of AI will do to help us identify the biggest holes in our game. I’m personally a huge fan of BGBlitz, and it’s still getting large updates (for free).

What’s the best backgammon mobile app?

The prettiest app imho is BGNJ, for iOS and Android. The AI is okay, but it has a very modern interface. It’s also the only app that has turn-based (correspondence-style) matches (iOS only).

In terms of analysis, the best AI available on iOS is XG Mobile (though it’s buggy and not being actively developed). The best AI available for Android is True Backgammon, which runs the BGBlitz AI.

What is PR/ER?

These stand for Performance Rate or Error Rate (they mean the same thing but different software uses different definitions). A PR of 0 means you played “perfectly” as assessed by the bot. Grandmasters play with a PR of ~3. Our goal will be to consistently get to a PR < 10, which means we have eliminated all enormous blunders from our game.

Are digital dice rigged?

Probably not? It’s not in anyone’s interest to rig the dice against you specifically. In any case, many, many articles have been written discussing this topic, so we don’t need to go into it in detail here… basically we are using the bots as a tool to help us identify mistakes. If you choose not to trust the bot’s dice, you can enable manual dice in any software and play by rolling your own ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  1. If you find yourself truly bothered by learning from the “mistakes” in Magriel, many corrections can be found online, including being published in Classic Backgammon Revisited by Jeremy Bagai. ↩︎