Doubling in priming games

Let’s start with the good news: there’s a backgammon idiom that says “prime vs primes are always a take.” That conveniently takes care of half of the equation! With that out of the way, we can spend the rest of the article learning when to double in a priming game.

Now comes the bad news: identifying a proper double in a priming game is tough. The two key criteria for a good double in a prime vs prime are to have:

1. Clear market losers
2. Way more timing than your opponent

We’ve addressed market losers several times in the course so far, so we should be familiar with the concept. This is the first time we will go into any amount of detail on the value of timing. Timing is a shorthand for “pips to waste”. Its meaning and usage differ slightly from how we would use it in ordinary English — in backgammon, timing is a noun, something you can accumulate or spend. This difference makes for awkward phrasing like “we have more timing.”

With that out of the way, let’s examine some positions and see if we can identify these two aspects in each.

In the first position below, both sides have built some strong 5-primes. Gary has 3 checkers trapped on the 3-pt anchor, and we have 1 backchecker at the edge of his prime:

Do we have any market losers? Certainly! If we roll a 6, our backchecker will jump the prime, and Gary will lose all of his priming equity. His game will convert into a 3-pt holding game with poor racing and contact prospects, probably a pass. We might also roll 22 or 44 and complete a 6-prime, which would put a stranglehold on him. Altogether, that adds up to about 13 market-losing sequences.

What if we don’t roll that market-losing 6? Suppose we roll something that eats many pips, like 55 or 54. In that unfortunate situation, we would be able to preserve our prime and waste some pips playing down from the midpoint. This kind of analysis highlights our timing advantage. Now, unless Gary rolls 53, he will be forced to hit loose to keep us from escaping, and then we can threaten to hit his blot or to jump the prime once again.

The next position presents a different prime vs prime scenario, but as we will see, the same two criteria apply:

Above, we both once again have strong 5-primes. As before, we have an extra timing “reservoir” in the checkers on the midpoint. Unlike in the previous position, we have 2 checkers behind Gary’s prime, forming an anchor. Here, jumping the prime is not enough to make up a market-loser, since Gary could still close out the checker that is left behind. However, this position is still a proper double. Why is that?

Often forgotten is that a “market-loser” does not just denote our play, but the entire sequence, including our opponent’s moves. Regardless of what we play, Gary’s in trouble on his turn next roll. Suppose we don’t roll a 6, and instead play something ordinary, like 52: 13/6. We didn’t jump the prime, which is perhaps to our deficit… However, more critically, if Gary doesn’t roll a 6 on his turn, he will be forced to start breaking his prime. Whereas in earlier moments in this game, we had a war of attrition going on, a clear loser is about to be declared in this prime vs. prime battle. This sequence, which is fairly typical to happen over the next few rolls due to the distinct difference in timing, is what constitutes a market-loser, and it happens most of the time.

Both of these positions teach us the value of timing in a prime vs. prime battle. Somehow, perhaps counter-intuitively, having a large pip deficit turns out to be an asset, sometimes amounting to enough of an advantage to warrant turning the cube!

These cubes are very easy to miss for a beginner, and it will take missing many of them to learn to identify them consistently. Identifying market losers is easy to overlook, and assessing timing isn’t much easier. One piece of advice is to keep an eye on the pip count as a shorthand to identify who has better timing. In the next article, we will encounter a class of doubling positions where it is even more critical to know the pip count, and more surprisingly, to accumulate a large pip count deficit.

Next lesson: Doubling in backgames