Author: Orad Reshef
-
You’ll need builders
—
by
Having sufficiently hammered home the importance of a strong board and of building a strong prime, it is finally time to discuss how to obtain them. The best play might be obvious if you roll a point-making number like 31 or 42, but otherwise, there is no perfectly safe way to do it. How do…
-
PR/ER
—
by
When analyzing a match, the bots will calculate and display a value called “PR” or “ER”. These acronyms are interchangeable, standing for either Performance Rate or Error Rate. A PR of 0 means you played “perfectly” as assessed by the bot, both in checker play and cube decisions. Grandmasters play with an average PR of…
-
Opening replies
—
by
In our course, we have a lesson where we take a beat to learn the Opening rolls. There are only like 15 to memorize, so it’s pretty easy. That’s not at all the case for the second roll, where you can find over 700 reasonable decisions. What are those opening replies? They could be found…
-
Don’t pass this up: part 2
—
by
We continue our list of automatic plays with a few more rules of thumb, this time pertaining to primes. Don’t pass up a 6-prime This one should hopefully feel obvious — if you are given the opportunity to complete a 6-prime, you must seize it. This structure is so powerful that it puts a stranglehold…
-
Don’t pass this up: part 1
—
by
Earlier in this module, we learned about many of the strongest “automatic plays”; we learned to always Just make the 5-point, to Anchor up, and to Point on head without thinking too hard. Below we’ll run through a few other plays that are way too good to pass up. As always, all rules have exceptions,…
-
Don’t bury checkers
—
by
You only start with 15 checkers. If you ever want to build a 6-prime, you can’t afford to waste that many. What does “wasting” a checker look like in backgammon? This question has had many different answers over the years. In the 1970s and 80s, when “pure” play was gaining popularity and priming was seen…