In the last lesson, we highlighted positions where leaving blots in our homeboard somehow turned out to be safer than any alternatives. Here, we will focus on positions at the complete other end of the spectrum — where the consequences of the hit are the main benefits of the loose play.
Tempo hit
Sometimes, hitting can be used as a kind of distraction play: by hitting, you prevent your opponent from building anything. In backgammon, this is called a tempo hit, and it could be another good reason to play loose.
It’s a bit tricky to learn when to tempo hit. Usually, it needs to be used as a last resort. For example, in the position below, Gary is threatening to make a 5-prime, or possibly to make a 5-pt board with the right combination of 4s, 5s, and 6s:
Somewhat remarkably, the best play here is to enter with the 2 and to hit loose on the 4-pt (bar/23, 7/4*). Simply put, behind a 4-prime and with 12 checkers in the zone, your winning prospects will slip through your fingers if you don’t do something to stop your opponent in their tracks. They might dance from the bar, and then you have a sliver of hope to escape and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
A word of caution regarding tempo hitting — things can go extremely wrong by tempo-hitting at the wrong moment. I would recommend saving these high-risk types of plays for only the most desperate situations. However, hopefully this lesson will shine some light on why sometimes the analysis recommends these seemingly crazy moves.
Hit the edge of your prime
A much more common loose-hitting manoeuvre is to hit checkers at the edge of your prime. We alluded to this briefly in an earlier lesson, but the point directly in front of a prime is like a battleground. You need to make that point to roll your prime forward, and your opponent wants to either anchor there and prevent that from happening, or to use it as a launchpad to escape your prime. It’s a contested territory, and both sides want to claim it!
The position above illustrates a classic example of this battle in action in a prime vs. prime. The safe play would be to casually break the midpoint and play 13/7, 13/10, giving us more ammunition for a blitz, or possibly to extend our prime. However, if Gary rolls a 2, he will anchor up, and all of our plans will be rendered meaningless. We need to act now, hit loose, and vacate the checker from the edge of our prime (13/7, 6/3*). If he then misses our blot, we will have that point already slotted, and will have the opportunity to make it and roll our prime forward.
In most cases, hitting a checker at the edge of the prime should be nearly automatic. Had it not been such a dangerous piece of advice, I would have included it in the Don’t pass this up series.
Fight for key points
Finally, it turns out that this advice applies to primes of all lengths. We just really don’t want to let our opponents anchor up at the edge of our prime, as it completely hampers our game plans. Perhaps surprisingly, this means we should also hit loose if there’s a checker at the edge of our 1-prime, that is, in front of our 6-pt:
Above, we are at the second roll of the game. We never had the chance to build any sort of prime… and we won’t, either, if Gary anchors up on the golden point. The best play here is to forgo making the 3-pt and to hit loose (13/5*). It’s perhaps counterintuitive that preventing an anchor should be more valuable than playing safe, but we should be extremely willing to hit loose on our 5-pt, 4-pt, or bar-pt if our opponent could threaten to anchor up.
Further reading:
- Hit or No Hit and More on Hitting by Bill Robertie, two articles on weighing when to hit loose in the early game.
Next lesson: Playing loose 3: containment
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