April 2009
Getting an edge or not
Apr 7th by Peter Hallberg
Backgammon has been kind of slow recently because I have spent all my time working on my poker game. I got involved in a poker project where I'm writing a poker blog a couple of times a week and doing a lot of hand analysis and strategy discussions.
Fun proposition
Anyhow, I came by this fun proposition at a recent backgammon club night. We were having some fun playing DMPs for beer. Of course we what it to be fair so we handicap the games according to skill level.
I was to play a beginner and he wanted to get the opening roll no matter who rolled the highest die. I thought that I could give him a little more and offered him doubles too. After a couple of games it was clear that I could spot him a bit more equity by handing him the first two roll including doubles. I didn't do well after that. Another player came by and offered to spot my opponent the same advantage if he was allowed to take a checker from his 6-point and 13-point and make his 23-anchor.
I laughed at him for giving accepting an even worse position that I have had. A lot of debate went on regarding who benefitted from the strong players getting his 23-anchor. We never came to a conclusion.
Now, to further confuse everybody we ended up debating how to move 21 in the opening roll if you were the player getting spotted the first two rolls. Some argued slotting the 5- and 4-point was best especially because you also had the next roll to cover. Others argued that just slotting the 5-point and getting a builder to the 11-point was better because it was more safe and offered better distribution and more checkers in the zone for future prime building. Again, we never came to even the slightest state of consensus.
Nordic Open
This coming Easter Nordic Open is held in Denmark as usual. I didn't have the money to attend this year but fortunately I became runner up in the TV2 Backgammon Cup receiving an entry to Nordic Open. During the last few weeks poker has been all over the calendar and I haven't been able to prepare for Nordic as I wanted to. I just hope luck and variance will make up for the missing long hours of training.
February 2009
Bad cube action
Feb 19th by Peter Hallberg
As I wrote in my last blog I would search for some interesting positions over the team tournament weekend. One of my team mates helped me annotate three matches. My checker play was really well in the first two matches but my take/pass decisions sucked big time. Apparently I was unable to pass any cubes. The one 8-cube I intact did pass was a no double.
Match to 17, White leads 8-3
White to roll or double?
| 114 |
                        |
| 87 |
| GNU Id: dtsQBBhnvhkAQA |
| GNU Match Id: AQEgAoAAGAAA |
This position really got me thinking. In money game I usually pass those cubes but I've seen enough examples where it's actually a take, to try to work out if that's the case here. Finally I decided that White had too few problems getting his back checker out and Blue having too many odd rolls when entering. I decided on pass for money. Now I had to decide for the current match score. I'm trailing 3-8/17 and I can take more. If this was an initial double it would just be a little easier to take than for money, but I would still pass. Being a redouble makes it a lot easier for me to take when I'm trailing. After careful consideration I decided to pass by a small margin.
Snowie totally murdered me calling this a no double at the current match score. This really got me thinking and I will in the coming weeks make a small study of redoubles in unbalanced match scores.
Back on the horse again
Feb 4th by Peter Hallberg
My posts dried up again because I haven't been able to find the energy need to write and update my webpage. Some major problems concerning my, now ended time at the university, took up all my energy and good spirit. Now I'm trying to let the frustrations go and get back to some of the things I enjoy.
As I promised back in December I'll give my take on the positions from my last blog entry. Unfortunately the rest of the problems have been misplaced and I won't be able to give them to you. Instead there will be lots of opportunities to find new challenging problems in the coming days. Tomorrow and the coming weekend I will be playing five 17p matches in the Danish team tournament and there's no chance I will leave empty handed - at least position wise.
Answers/comments
All the positions from last blog came from an internal tournament and someone actually moved them wrong.
Position 1:
The race is fairly even and after playing bar/16 you just need to clear the 16 point. You have no weaknesses in you position and you are ahead in the race. This is the right move by a huge margin. The player in question actually played bar/20, 6/2. He augmented that it gave him more control and white would have more problems playing home safely. The problem is that white now got a lot of free tries to attack blue on the 20-point. Furthermore if white should get even more behind in the race he will surely attack the lone checker to fight back.
Position 2:
This is a somewhat tricky position. White have most of a prime in front of blues back men while blue only are trying to contain one checker of whites with an even weaker prime. A lot of people would pass this as blue but they forget that white still have a lot of work to do. He has to escape his back man and close his prime before blue get's his defensive anchor on the 20-point. That's plenty of work for white to give blue a comfortable take.
The question is now if white can double at all. He is certainly in a strong position and a lot will be decided within the next roll. If white escapes and doesn't get hit it a huge double pass. If hits one of blues blots is a huge pass. If blue doesn't get a 4 soon he will roll after roll get into more problems. This all points to a double.
Position 3:
Here white is clearly a huge favorite and has an easy double. Can blue take this one? I thought about it for a while and decided that it at best would be a marginal take. Over the board I would have passed it knowing I couldn't have made a big mistake. Answering a quiz question is a whole different story.
Basically white has a lot of work to do to get home even if he closes his 5-prime. Still it won't take blue more than an ace followed by a 6 to jump the prime. The fact that whites forces are scattered all over the board could pull for a take. Still I don't like it and have to say pass. However Snowie thinks it's an error not to take. I don't care - I'm not Snowie.
Till next time - have fun.
December 2008
The flu and an earth quake - What a week
Dec 20th by Peter Hallberg
After a week in bed with the flu I'm more or less back up on my feet again. Most of the time since last blog has been spend on WotLK and poker. The only exiting thing I can report about is the biggest earth quake in Denmark since 1917. It was so big that you could actually feel it! It lasted for 5 seconds and it shook the house approximately double as much than a big truck passing by. It was measured to 4.7-4.9 on the Richter scale. As Carter Mattig wrote to me: 'I wouldn't move just yet ;-)'
WotLK
I finally managed to get to level 80. Now the hunt for epics has begun. So far I've accepted that I don't have as much time to play WotLK as needed to gear up cheap. I spend half of my gold on Auction House (AH) where I bought reasonable good epics. Still I sucked in a 25-man raid where one of the tanks did more DPS than me ?
Poker
My losses was turned into +10 buyins but lost it all again in two days. Heads Up (HU) is extremely volatile and I need to learn to accept that fact. The good side of this is that I still enjoy to play this high paced game where you only have to zero in on one opponent. I still believe that December will turn out profitable.
Backgammon
The team tournament is on Christmas break and we are currently holding the 2nd place in our division with the same number of points as the leading team. This time I want to show you the backgammon quiz we had at our Christmas dinner party closing the season in Hatten. There were 6 problems. See the first 3 problems below. I'll give you my solutions and the last 3 problems in my next blog.
Problem 3: Match to 11, Blue leads 2-0
White to roll or double?
| 147 |
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| 159 |
| GNU Id: 2K7BICHIc/AYEA |
| GNU Match Id: MAFgAQAAEAAA |
Read the full blog...
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