Author: Orad Reshef

There’s a number of common backgammon idioms. One of them is to “Clear from the rear and don’t ask questions.1” This refers to situations where you’re trying to bring your checkers home safely. An example is shown in the position below: You’re ahead in the race and if you could just skip over your opponent’s…

Here’s kind of a tricky question if you’ve never thought about it: how many pips away from an attacking checker is the most dangerous, that is,  the one that leaves your opponent the most rolls that can hit you (shots)? We know from other board games that 7 is the most likely number when rolling…

As discussed in the last lesson, you want to avoid leaving lone checkers (blots) in your home board within striking distance of your opponent’s checkers on the 1-pt. But the goal of the game requires you to bring your checkers into your home board! How can you do that safely? The answer is to make…

This course begins assuming you at least know the basic rules of backgammon… maybe a friend or family member showed you how to play, and you’re interested in improving. If that isn’t the case, and you’re really starting from 0, you should maybe start by reading the rules on wikipedia or backgammon galore. In this…

Now that we’re done with our survey of the backgammon rules and notation, we can finally start talking about strategy. In this next section, we will go over some general rules of thumb on how to play safely. This will act as our baseline — playing safe turns out to most often be the correct…

Backgammon is a race. You’re trying to get all of your checkers into your homeboard (and then out of it) before your opponent can. It’s bad for the race for your checkers to get hit. It’s the worst thing for the race for your checker to be hit in your own homeboard. In the position…