Something Good from Backgammon

As many of you have noticed, I’ve been reading some backgammon books recently to interview Gambling with an Edge guests. This is not going to become a backgammon blog. My main gig remains video poker.

Also, to prepare for the interviews, I watched some YouTube videos of international championship tournaments to see what had changed since I last played the game seriously almost 30 years ago. 

One such tournament I found particularly enlightening was the 2019 Ultimate Backgammon Championship. This was a two-person final between “Mochy” from Japan and Sander Lylloff from Denmark, who some argue might be the two best players in the world. I saw nothing in the video to lead me to believe otherwise, although the competitors in the 2020 semi-finals played better in terms of PR score, which I will discuss in the next paragraph.

The format of the tournament was interesting. It consisted of up to twelve 7-point matches, where they received one point for winning each match and one point for playing closest to perfectly (termed “lowest PR”) — according to the eXtreme Gammon Plus bot. The first player to 13 points won. 

The players also played with a clock (similar to a chess clock — except in backgammon each player gets up to 12 seconds to roll the dice and play the checkers before any time comes off the clock) where if they ran out of time, they lost the match no matter what the score was. There are many zillion possible positions in backgammon and difficult positions happen all the time.

In the commentary, the announcers claimed that both players wanted to win the PR battle more than the matches themselves. I’m not sure that all players would agree with that, but that’s pretty much how I play video poker.

Equating “lowest PR” with “lowest EV error rate” (a simplification because PR and EV are defined differently, but that’s close enough for today’s discussion), my goal when I play is to play every hand as accurately as possible. Within certain time constraints.

Let’s say I know a game at the 99.8% EV level and can play 1,000 hands per hour (hph), but could look up several hands and get my play up to the 100% EV level but only play 600 hph because it takes time to look things up. It makes financial sense to play at the faster pace, since my actual goal is to maximize dollars earned per hour rather than minimize my EV error rate.

Keep in mind that the previous paragraph assumes I am playing a game where the overall edge (including the game itself, the slot club, comps, promotions, mailers, etc.) is significantly positive. In such a case, the more hands per hour I can play will usually dominate playing slightly better at a slower rate. 

Were I playing a game where the house had the edge, playing at the slower, more accurate rate would make sense. But on those games, I prefer the strategy of zero hph. In other words, I would not play these games at all.

Playing correctly is positively correlated with winning — but it’s not a perfect correlation. In both games. Probably in most games. Certainly, this is true for life in general. For me, this is a useful thing to remember during those times where even though I played correctly, I lost. That’s just part of the game. But I strongly believe I will come out ahead in the end.

When I say this philosophy is true in life, I mean the people who socially distance and wash their hands frequently will have a better chance of surviving the current pandemic. But some of the people following proper procedures will catch the disease anyway. And some of the careless people who don’t practice good techniques will not.

But overall, I prefer the chances of the people doing it the right way. We are all literally betting our lives that the path we follow is the correct one. The stakes we gamble for in video poker are much smaller than betting our lives, but the principle is the same.