A Look at In the Game Until the End: Winning in Ace-Point Endgames by Robert Wachtel

From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, I played backgammon regularly at the Cavendish West Club in greater Los Angeles. Through much of that period, a man named Bob Wachtel also frequented the club.

I got to be a strong intermediate backgammon player. I learned to stay out of the same games that Wachtel played in because he was a considerably stronger player than I was.

He still is. He’s top ten in the world, according to some rankings. I haven’t played competitively since 1993 and wasn’t all that great then.

While we didn’t compete against each other, we had many friendly conversations about any number of things. He was one of the “good guys” I remembered from the Cavendish.

I dropped out of backgammon in 1993 when I moved to Las Vegas. I wasn’t able to rise to the expert level in Los Angeles and the Las Vegas Backgammon Club had members reputed to be every bit as strong as those in L.A. One player who played in Vegas that was stronger than me was Richard Munchkin, whose brother actually roomed with Wachtel for a while in the mid-80s. I wanted to support myself gambling, and playing against superior players was not the key to success. (That’s equivalent to gambling at video poker when the house has the edge.)

While I was fluent in the backgammon literature prior to 1993, the only books I’ve read on the subject since then have been to prepare for Gambling with an Edge interviews. This got me to read books by Bill Robertie, Kent Goulding, Jake Jacobs, and Kit Wolsey, all very knowledgeable players and writers.

I can now add Robert Wachtel to that list, although he’s still “Bob” to me.

I recently came across a reference to his 2000 volume, In the Game Until the End: Winning in Ace-Point Endgames. I emailed his publisher, Bill Robertie, for contact information and we hooked up. Wachtel remembered me, of course.

We chatted on the phone. I picked up some new information about a few players I hadn’t seen for 30 or more years. He agreed to send me some of what he’s written and will be a guest on the show, possibly several times, in the near future.

An ace-point game in backgammon is where you are behind, usually own the doubling cube, and have two or more checkers on your opponent’s ace point. Your opponent must bear off his checkers past your checkers.

These are not positions where your equity is very high, but they can be won. To win, your opponent must leave one or more shots, you must hit one or more of them, and you must then win from there. This parlay takes some doing, but when you find yourself in one of these positions, this parlay is your only chance. So, you need to know how to pull it off.

The book starts with ace-point games at their best. You have a full-prime (e.g. twelve checkers, two each on six consecutive spots), two checkers behind the prime so you are in no danger of needing to break the prime immediately, one remaining checker on the ace point, and your opponent with between two and five checkers left. Most ace-point games are actually worse than this, but it’s still useful to start with these given positions as a benchmark.

Your choice in each case is whether you remain on the ace point or run. If all of your checkers are out of your opponent’s home court (which consists of six spaces), you will lose a gammon — which is a double loss. Should one or more of your checkers remain in the home court or on the bar at the game’s end, you will lose a backgammon — which is a triple loss. The only way to lose a single game (for a single loss) is to hit one of your opponent’s men. The way these positions are set up, you are too far back to get off the gammon by running.

Since you are assumed to own the doubling cube at a value of 2, a gammon will cost you 4 points. If remaining costs you 3.5 points on average, clearly it’s right to stay. Conversely, if sticking around costs you 4.5 points on average, you should run.

The problems are discussed recursively. That is, the simplest positions are analyzed, and a value is calculated (such as -3.5 or -4.5, to use the examples in the previous paragraph). If this position is reached on one or more branches from a more complex starting position, the value is not recalculated, because we already know what it is.

One of the positions studied at length is the Coup Classique, where your opponent’s three remaining checkers are all on his two point and you have one checker on his ace point. If he rolls 2-1, 3-1, 4-1, 5-1, or 6-1 (which happens 10 out of 36 rolls), he will leave a double blot, meaning if you roll an ace or a deuce (which happens 20 times out of 36 rolls) you will hit at least one of his checkers. If you can hit one checker, you almost always can hit the second one as well. If you can close your board with both of these men on the bar, you have real winning chances.

Were I still someone who played backgammon for money, I would memorize the results of this analysis — and would also memorize the techniques Wachtel used to analyze these positions. These positions happen often enough that strong players should know these things.

When I was a player, the only way to know these things for sure was through playing them over and over again against yourself or other players — and keeping track of what the results were. This is often an expensive way to obtain knowledge because there was often betting on what was the correct play.

There is one position in the book that a famous Australian player would play either side against any player in the world for as much as they wanted. This meant the position was roughly even, but the position required a lot of skill to play correctly. He had studied the position more than anybody else and made lots of money playing this proposition.

If you are someone who plays backgammon for money, you should strongly consider purchasing Wachtel’s book. It has information you need to know. The book is published by the Gammon Press.

You might want to check out his tribute to Paul Magriel, one of backgammon’s shining lights. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsjCQxvtB8&feature=youtu.be There are dozens of pictures of players from the 70s and later. I recognized all of them and it was a pleasant stroll down memory lane.

In addition to said stroll, it was also an authoritative recap of the history of backgammon in New York and elsewhere in these years. The last several pictures show Magriel’s deterioration as he approached death. I saw Magriel a year or so before his death. He didn’t look good, but he was still optimistic and charismatic. I’m glad Wachtel produced this tribute.