About Backgammon and how Backgammon software changed my life

Do you know Backgammon? If not, it's a board game for two players, and it's great. Trust me. And now go to the Backgammon Galore (best BG site around) to find out all about it.

But I guess most people do know Backgammon, or they think they do. And like me some years ago they think "isn't that the fun little game you play with dice - nice but all about getting lucky dice rolls". So let me get this out of the way:

Backgammon is not a game of chance

well, actually it is, after all, you're rolling dice and then play a move depending on them. But the perception that many people have about Backgammon is that chance is the dominating factor of the game. I used to think that way for a long time; I've played a game of Backgammon now and then, thought I'd be reasonable good, but when I needed a real challenge I went to play Chess or something.

Then I got Jellyfish. And my Backgammon life changed forever :-)

You don't know Jellyfish? Jellyfish is, to my knowledge, one of the first Backgammon programs that based on neural net technology, and there's a free version of it to download. I don't want to dive into explaining why this again is interesting from a computer science point of view, just let me tell you that neural nets seem to be particularly well suited for Backgammon. As a result, the top Backgammon programs play as good as the best Backgammon players. And you can download them from e.g. jelly.effect.no (dated freeware version of Jellyfish), from www.gnubg.org (Gnu Backgammon which is freeware), or www.bgblitz.com (BG Blitz free version).

I did that, downloaded the Jellyfish player, and got beaten. Over and over. It was like magic, the dice that the game rolled always seemed to fit perfectly, while mine were often awkward, leaving me in unfortunate positions too often. My first reaction was mistrust; I switched from computer generated dice to rolling the dice manually. And got beaten. Over and over. Again.

After a while of this I needed to rethink my opinion on Backgammon. Yes, it is based on rolling dice, but it's 90% strategy and only 10% luck. From then on I was hooked, even bought Jellyfish (the mean marketing there was that you get Jellyfish Player for free which beats the hell out of you, but in order to get an insight into its thinking you have to pay). Only then I started to learn about the finer details of Backgammon (I recommend Bill Robertie's great Backgammon books; as a starter to show you what strong players are thinking, you can take a free look at extremely interesting annotated matches at the Backgammon galore.

What Backgammon gives you is the same level of strategic planning you have in Chess (e.g. should I play solid or go for a Blitz, should I attack his back men or advance my back men, should I hit him even if this exposes some of my men, and so on), but due to the dice you can't simply think ahead so far but rely on intuition and experience when deciding for a move. This combination of skill and luck is quite unique. And without backgammon software I would never have even found out about the depth of this game. Isn't that strange?