Author: Orad Reshef

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…

Next lesson: Playing safe We have a few more brief topics to tackle before we take on how to improve your checker play. Here’s a list of FAQs about checker play, in no particular order. Forced moves If there is a possibility to play both numbers in a roll, they must both be played. A…

Playing a single game of backgammon is certainly fun, but it doesn’t last very long on its own, so typically an evening of backgammon will consist of a series of games. There’s different ways you can choose to score your game series, and you will need to adapt your strategy to match it. There are…

The doubling cube is typically ignored by beginner players. It’s that extra cube that comes in a backgammon set with numbers in powers of two (2, 4, 8… 64) on its faces: There are So. Many. Articles. about the doubling cube. Cube play is almost its own game within a game. Entire books are written…