Playing loose 3: containment

The next great reason to leave loose blots in your homeboard is when you’re playing a containment game. Sometimes, you’re desperate to keep your opponent from leaving and will stop at nothing to keep your opponent from doing so.

Below is our first example. We’re trailing by a ton in the race, and are split and vulnerable in Gary’s homeboard. Meanwhile, he’s rolled a fantastic running role, sprinting his final backchecker into the outfield:

We roll a 21, and have a few options available to us. We can anchor up (something with 24/22), which in many other situations would be the most natural play. We could build our board (6/4) in anticipation of a blot-hitting contest. Lastly, we have the option to hit Gary’s escaped checker (13/10*).

At first glance, we are probably reluctant to hit; we have a blot exposed in our inner board, and are probably already threatening to be gammoned without an anchor and a weaker homeboard. I’ll tell you that when I encountered this position over the board, I agonized over the hit for a while. Learning that it was the right play, despite the obvious weaknesses in my position, unlocked this lesson for me. It’s not even close — it’s a massive double blunder to forego the hit¹ Without hitting, Gary can cruise to victory with the racing lead and the many landing spots for his midpoint checker, and our checkers are deep enough that we don’t have that much outfield contact. This could very well be our last chance to hit. The lesson here is not to let our opponent escape their final backchecker if we’re behind in the race.

We could easily manufacture a much more egregious example of this principle at play:

Here, we have a fairly beautiful structure, a broken 5 prime, and Gary’s last backchecker is still in our homeboard. The right play here, once again by the margin of a blunder, is to hit the last backchecker to prevent it from escaping.

A practical player would ask a few quite reasonable questions. The first would be, “hit with what?” Using our 3, we can hit using one of the checkers from the 7-pt to hit loose (bar/23, 7/4*), leaving only 1 blot in our homeboard? The second question would be “what escaping checker?” We see the white checker behind a 4-prime, and it feels quite contained. However, the truth is that any 5 or 6 (20 numbers) will jump the prime into a wide open outfield. Over half the time, that checker is a free man, and Gary wins the game outright. Actually, after hitting loose, we are leaving fewer shots that can seal the game in Gary’s favour. Hitting loose turns out to be a bargain.

I must stress that this principle is fairly thematic and is quite painful for beginner players to grasp. We are trained not to leave blots in our homeboard, not to break our precious structure, and not to surrender our anchors, and yet this principle supersedes all of the others.

1. I suspect that a lot of the hitting value comes from gaining tempo and protecting your vulnerable backcheckers from a blitz. ↩︎

Next lesson: Playing loose 4: Two on the bar is better by far