Tag: backgammon

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Trying to Go Back Again

From 1974 to 1980, I was involved full-time in backgammon — to the tune of 3,000 hours a year, including playing, studying, and for a brief while running a tournament. I went broke. While I had done well against new players, the backgammon craze waned, and the remaining players were superior to me. Playing against superior players is a prescription for bankruptcy.

Over the next decade, I played or studied perhaps 1,000 hours a year because I had to maintain a full-time job to support myself. And I managed to play for smaller stakes against weaker players. At the end, I was a fairly strong intermediate player, by the standards of the day. There were a number of much stronger players around. Try as I might, I just didn’t have the ability to evenly compete with them. And so I avoided playing them.

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Backgammon Then and Now

Author’s Note:  I played backgammon professionally for almost 20 years, then gave it up completely. I reached the high intermediate level, but most of the players that were interested in gambling with me were better. That was a prescription for disaster. I needed to get a job because I was not a winning player anymore. Today’s blog has nothing to do with video poker, but it does have to do with gambling.

I played most of my backgammon at the Cavendish West, which was in the West Hollywood section of Los Angeles, from about 1974 to 1993. Some of the regulars back then who are still active in tournament backgammon are Bob Glass, Jim Pasko, Steve Sax, Joe Russell, and Bob Wachtel. (There are likely others I don’t know are still playing.) They were all better than me back then, and they’ve kept studying the game while I’ve devoted my attention to other things.

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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. 

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A Look at Bill Robertie’s New Series on Backgammon Openings

It was not my intention to spend a lot of time on backgammon, as backgammon is not my game of choice — nor is it really much of a gambling game anymore. But just as we were preparing to air two GWAE shows with Bob Wachtel on his Backgammon Chronicles, Richard and I received a review copy of Bill Robertie’s first book in his series How to Play the Openings in Backgammon.

Robertie is a two-time world champion in backgammon and author of numerous books on the game. In addition, he’s published several books on chess and co-authored a popular series of poker books with Dan Harrington. He’s the publisher for Gammon Press and moderates the backgammon forum on the Two Plus Two website. Simply put, he’s at the pinnacle of gaming/gambling writers. 

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A Look at Robert Wachtel’s The Backgammon Chronicles: A Pro’s Adventures on Tour

Robert Wachtel is a world-class backgammon player — Richard Munchkin and I have each known him for more than forty years. He recently self-published a two-volume set of Chronicles which I read and enjoyed. While Bob will be a guest in the near future on Gambling with an Edge, I thought I’d give readers a preview of the books.

The essays in each volume are mostly previously published stories from backgammon periodicals — updated for the book. I haven’t kept up with the backgammon literature since I left the game in 1993, so it was all new to me (other than a remembrance piece written when Paul Magriel passed away). Color photographs enhance the experience.

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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.

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A Certain Kind of Approach

A month or two ago, I mentioned on the Gambling with an Edge podcast that I have a buddy with two kids — “Jack,” 12 years old and “Mary Ann,” 10 years old — who are becoming fascinated with the game of backgammon. I’ve agreed to provide them with some backgammon instructions, and I’m enjoying the process of teaching them. I’ve taught adults for years but have had limited experience with teaching children.

The lesson on this particular day was about the doubling cube.

“Let’s say,” I began, “that from a certain position, your opponent will win 26 times out of 36 and you will win 10 times out of 36.” Backgammon players will have no trouble constructing one or more positions that meet this criterion, but I want today’s column to be understood by those readers who do not understand backgammon as well as those who do.

“Let’s say that you are playing for $1 and your opponent,” I continued, “offers you the doubling cube.  What this means is that you have the choice of accepting the cube and playing out the game for $2 or passing the cube and conceding $1 right now. What would you do?”

Both kids are pretty bright and are in STEM schools, which specialize in science and math, but the boy is two years older.  When it comes to figuring out mathematical problems (which is what I thought this was), those extra two years make a difference.

At this point in time, neither knew how to figure this out (I hoped that this would be different by the end of the lesson), so both went with instinct. Jack could see that he was a big underdog to win, and he’d much prefer to lose $1 rather than $2, so he announced that he would pass the double.

Mary Ann wasn’t interested in the math at all. Her goal was to beat her brother. Since she knew she couldn’t beat him by going with the same answer he gave, she announced she was going to take the double.

Then I went through the math so they would know how to solve these “take-or-pass” backgammon problems in the future.

If they passed the double, like Jack wanted to do, they would lose $1. That much was clear to everybody.

But if they took the double, how do you figure that out?

Well, 10 times out of 36 you win, which would put you ahead $20 on those rolls. Twenty-six times out of 36 you lose, which would put you down $52 on those rolls. Your net loss in 36 rolls is $32, so the average loss is $32/$36 which comes out to 89¢. Since 89¢ is smaller than $1, the correct play is to take the double.

The acronym “QED” comes from the Latin quod erat demonstrandum and means I have shown that which was to be demonstrated — or, basically, this math proves my case. Neither child, however, was impressed by what I had done.

Jack assured me he understood the math, but he would still pass the double. He simply didn’t want to risk losing the extra dollar most of the time.

Mary Ann cared even less for the math. The important thing to her was she got it right and her brother got it wrong! What could possibly be a better result than that? “That was fun! Do you have another puzzle for us, Bob?”

There was nothing more for me to say. In my opinion, playing games successfully depends on understanding and following the math. They both rejected the math. I was out of ammunition.

I spoke to their father, a successful gambler, a few days later about this. I think he took the right approach. He said, “I really don’t care if they become professional gamblers or not. But if they do, I want them to know the math backwards and forwards. They certainly don’t need to know this math when they are pre-teenagers — and who knows what their aptitudes will be in a decade or more? Later, if and when they decide that playing games competently is what they want to do, that’s when it’s important that they learn this stuff.”

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Lessons from Backgammon, Part 1 of 2

From 1974 through 1980, I averaged 80-100 hours per week playing or studying backgammon. For the next 12 years, I had a job (because I lost my bankroll playing backgammon) and reduced my backgammon time to an average of about 15 hours per week. In 1994, I began playing video poker and haven’t played significant backgammon since that time.

The success I’ve experienced at video poker is at least partly due to what I learned as a backgammon player.

I addressed this subject in my autobiography, Million Dollar Video Poker, in the chapter called “Lessons from the Cavendish West.” The Cavendish West was a bridge/gin/backgammon club in the West Hollywood part of Los Angeles. That was where most of my play took place.

That book was written more than 10 years ago, and I haven’t reread it recently. I won’t reread the chapter I mentioned until after these two articles are completed. I’m sure there will be a lot of overlap, but my perspective has changed over the last decade.

Video poker and backgammon are played quite differently. But in such things as preparation, looking for an advantage, and dealing with winning and losing, I was able to apply my backgammon skills to video poker.  The following are some of the things I learned from backgammon that continue to serve me well today:

     1.  Everybody won some of the time. Everybody lost some of the time. But one group of players won most of the time and another group of players lost most of the time. The losing players would explain to whomever listened that it was their bad luck that caused them to be losers. The winning players would pretend to agree with them. After all, without losing players there could be no winning players.

 

     2.  The strong players regularly played “propositions.” A proposition is when you place the checkers in an agreed upon position and play it out over and over again. Sometimes odds were offered. Sometimes not. Although there were some who did this because they were hustling, usually it was done in order to better understand the position.

Backgammon, at the time, had no computer programs that could tell you that this play was the best from this particular position. So, players had to figure it out, and playing propositions repeatedly was one way to do that. This was one way they studied, and if you put a gambling element into it, it was more interesting.

Today they have a number of computerized backgammon programs primarily developed by artificial intelligence. From a particular position, the program will tell you that this move gives you an EV of 51.2% and this other move gives you an EV of 48.1%. The program “knows” this because it plays each position over and over again until it comes up with an estimate. If you accept this particular program as being best, clearly the first move is superior to the second. Usually a play this close could not be determined with certainty by players at the table, but good players would often sense that the first play was better.

Players who play a lot against computer programs today get much better much faster than we did back when I played. Even though I had thousands of hours of experience and was a pretty fair player back in the early 90s, I would not stand a chance against today’s players. The computer programs have increased knowledge about the game considerably.

     3.  The biggest enemy of many players was their emotions. Backgammon has frequent situations where you can be way ahead and then a few rolls later you are hopelessly behind. Some players were devastated when this happened against them — and it happened several times every day.

Going “on tilt,” or “steaming,” were frequent results of that lack of emotional control. In backgammon there is a doubling cube, where stakes can be doubled mid-game, and then doubled again, and again, at later times. At each of these doubling occurrences, emotional control is necessary to correctly evaluate whether or not the doubling should be offered by one player and accepted or rejected by the other.

When players were steaming, frequently they doubled too early and/or accepted too late. It was a very expensive way to play.

     4.  It was important to evaluate your “opponent.” In video poker this is relatively easy, as your opponent is a game, such as 9/6 Jacks or Better or perhaps 7/5 Bonus Poker, which has a well-known return for perfect play. Perfect play is relatively simple given today’s software products.

In backgammon, your opponents are human beings — who have different skill sets and different emotional strengths and weaknesses. In addition, these opponents, like all humans, have good days and bad days.

Evaluating one person is difficult enough, but often backgammon is played in a version called a “chouette,” which means a game with three or more players in it. To properly evaluate a chouette, you need to know the strengths of each player — which is often an impossible task to do precisely.

Equally important was accurately evaluating your own skill level relative to others.

     5.  Hand in hand with opponent evaluation was game selection. To be a winning player you had to play in games where you had the advantage. In video poker it’s fairly easy to figure that out. In backgammon, it’s much more difficult.

If you were playing another player heads up, and you were better than him, it would have been fairly unusual for him to continue to want to play you. Social skills were important here. I observed charming players who could always find excellent games because they were so much fun to play around. I observed crabby people where the opposite was true.

I will continue this discussion next week.

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The Important Message

I’m a fan of The Moth podcast, in which people stand up without notes and give a 10-minute autobiographical talk about something interesting. Some time ago I thought I would try to be a performer on that show. I couldn’t use notes to tell the story live, but I sure as hell could use them to help prepare for the talk. So, I wrote out what I’d say about an incident that happened almost 40 years ago.

Sometime later I decided not to try out for The Moth, although I thought the story would fit well enough into this blog. I’ve already shared parts of this story with my readers, but not all of it, and certainly not the big secret I reveal at the end. So here is what I was planning to say:

In the 1970s, I was a professional gambler. My game was backgammon. It was played in discos, at least in greater Los Angeles, which is where I lived. I even took lessons learning how to disco dance so I could hang out in these discos without looking like a gambling hustler. I also played at an underground club near Los Angeles called the Cavendish West.

It isn’t hard being a successful gambler when the competition isn’t very good. And that was the way backgammon was for me in the mid-1970s.

I had first heard of the game from an article in Playboy, which I really only picked up because of the articles. I bought every book I could find on the subject, bought a board to practice on, and soon was in business. As bad as the books were at the time, my studying was more than my competitors did. Plus, I was smarter than average and had been playing board games since I was a pre-teen. I did well.

At the Cavendish, I became a regular.  In backgammon, you are not playing against the house. You are playing against other players and the house charges each player a rental fee for providing the boards and the place where other like-minded players can congregate.

No matter how good or bad you are, your success at backgammon is primarily determined by your skill relative to that of your opponents.  If you are the third best player in the world but always are playing with numbers 1 and 2, you’re going to be a loser.

For those who don’t play the game, it’s a board game where there’s a special device called the doubling cube. If you’re not playing for money — or perhaps trying to win a backgammon tournament — the doubling cube is irrelevant and kept in the box. If you are competing for cash, though, learning to use the doubling cube well is important. It’s every bit as important as learning to move the checkers well.

Without going into details about the cube, it can be used to increase the stakes of the game dramatically. If your opponent is too aggressive or too passive or too timid with the cube, so much the better. Systematic mistakes were exploitable. So, similar to reading poker tells, good players kept a catalog of sorts on the doubling cube practices of every opponent. If you saw your opponent make a doubling cube error, AND THEN MAKE IT AGAIN in another game, this was called “confirmation” and you had a potential gold mine. A single game of backgammon usually lasted less than 10 minutes — and we played for 6-8 hours at a time. There were LOTS of opportunities to get confirmation on these exploitable habits of others.

In 1979, I was a much better backgammon player than I was in 1975. But I was going broke. Gone was the regular infusion of bad players that were easy to find in the disco era and not so easy to find anymore. The players still in the game had been there for as long as I had. I was a good player, but I was mostly playing REALLY good players. This was not a recipe for success.

I started contemplating getting a job. This I viewed as an admission that I was no longer able to live off my wits in the gambling world. I was no longer able to accurately assert superiority over those doofusses who actually had to find a job in order to survive.  I was now going to be a doofus too.

This was very traumatic. I also didn’t know what I could do to earn money. Although I had a pretty good education and got up to the almost-PhD level in Economics, I had been fired five years earlier from a think-tank job in which I was a research associate. I hadn’t read any economic books or journal articles in five years. My skills were woefully out of date.

Since I had used some Fortran-based computer packages in my research-associate position years before, I decided to market myself as a computer programmer. The available jobs were in COBOL, a computer language I didn’t know at all. Still, I read a how-to-program-in-COBOL book one weekend and went on a job interview the following Monday. Before I did, I shaved off the beard I had worn for 10 years and got a haircut that made me look like a Republican. God! It was awful!

I was interviewed by two guys, both of whom liked to gamble. I talked backgammon with the first guy and blackjack with the second. Although my skills weren’t good enough to survive as a gambling professional, they were WAY better than these two wannabe gamblers. They were impressed with my abilities. The $25,000 a year job in programming I was applying for had been filled that morning, but there was a $35,000 a year job as a systems analyst available. It was now the week before Christmas and their budget didn’t allow another hire until after the first of the year. Was I interested in starting in two weeks?

I was, although I had no clue what a systems analyst did. I went to a bookstore, bought two books on how to be a systems analyst, and went home where I stayed in bed for two weeks. I’d come out of my room only to grab something out of the refrigerator or go to the bathroom. Otherwise, I read the books over and over again and was seemingly catatonic. I was sure I was going to be found out as a fraud and fired immediately.   When that happened, I didn’t know what I was going to do. The fact that I was having to get a job in the first place wasn’t helping matters any. And I liked my hippie look WAY better than looking like a Baptist preacher.  But that look was now gone. Not shaving for two weeks didn’t come close to making me feel better.

I was living with a lady named Betty at the time. I didn’t say a word to her for those two weeks. Not one word. She’d ask what she could do to help, or suggest I get out and exercise a bit, or maybe we could go see a movie or something, and I’d just lay there with my back to her, totally mute. I didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t anything to say. I was a doofus who looked like a Republican.

She kept the refrigerator stocked with good eating options, bless her heart, and didn’t get too freaked out by my behavior.

Two weeks later, Wednesday January 2, 1980, I was 10 minutes early to work. I came up with a couple of good answers to questions I was asked in the first week and somehow lasted on that job for three years — at which time I went out and found a better one. I can’t tell you exactly how I did it. I just don’t know. I suspect being in the right place at the right time helped a lot.

One year after I had started working, I received a phone call at three in the morning from a lady friend named Margo. Not a romantic lady friend — I was still with Betty — but a good friend nonetheless. Margo was contemplating going back to work. Margo was a nurse and had written some books on pain management. She had gone around the country lecturing to nurses about treating those in pain. But her 15 minutes of fame was now up. She no longer got enough attendees to come to her lectures. It was time for her to go back to work.

Like I had been, Margo was severely traumatized. She didn’t want to go back to work. She knew I had gone through something similar the year before and needed some good advice. And she needed it now! At three in the morning. What could I tell her?

She had just returned from a nightclub where she’d probably had several beers (or something stronger). I was sound asleep when the call came. I gave her the best secret I could come up with on the spur of the moment. I told Margo that I hadn’t spoken to Betty for two weeks prior to starting my new job and recommended she not speak to Betty either. Not talking to Betty, I told Margo, was the secret to my success, and now I was going back to sleep. Good night.

Flippant though it was, Margo took my good advice to heart. For the next 10 days or so, Betty and I would get messages on our family answering machine that said things like, “Bob, I’m getting ready to start working at a hospital a week from Monday. Don’t let Betty know. I’m not talking to her.”

Margo started her job and did well at it. This, my friends, is confirmation! You now have the magic secret of getting through whatever it is that you are fearing most. And that secret is: Don’t talk to Betty.

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Where I Grew Up

Someone pointed me to an article in a West Hollywood publication about the Cavendish West. I was surprised to find that I was quoted in the article as the author never spoke to me. He did, however, paraphrase some things I’ve said on the radio show.

The Cavendish West is the place where I learned many lessons about gambling — from about 1975 – 1991. Although I did play a bit of contract bridge there for money, I was never a winning player at that game. My game of choice was backgammon, where I was successful — for a time.

In the mid-1970s, when backgammon was a sexy game, was played in discos, and was written about in popular magazines, I was sufficiently above average that I did quite well financially. Eventually the game passed out of favor and the Cavendish was left with only the good pros beating up on the not-so-good pros. I fell into the higher end of the lower category — and eventually, around 1980, I had to go out and get a job to support myself. It was awful.

I wrote a “Lessons from the Cavendish West” chapter in my Million Dollar Video Poker autobiography, but today I want to primarily address other things.

At the Cavendish, there were a LOT of good players. You could sit and watch them play, and so long as you were quiet you were generally allowed to look on. As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” You could take notes and see how the big boys did things.

Sometimes they’d take three or so minutes to make a play and you could see what they finally did, but you had no idea of what their thought process was. For me, just watching was pretty boring. Playing was a lot more fun than watching. Still is. I basically had a free backgammon university education available to me, but instead chose to go and play backgammon against somebody over whom I had little or no edge. That led to a form of gambler’s ruin.

Today I hope I’m smarter than that. Video poker opportunities are less plentiful and less lucrative than they used to be. Studying, scouting, and waiting for the good ones are all part of succeeding these days. It’s easy to predict a day will come that I’ll be playing two hours a week or less. I’m preparing for that day. Perhaps you should too. Those who continue to play even though they are not the favorite will continue to lose.

Other factors that were drummed into me concerned sleep management and substance abuse. During certain periods in the 1980s, I worked 50+ hours a week in IT departments and then tried playing and/or studying 40 hours a week of backgammon. Both careers suffered — as did my social life. Today I can’t stay alert and play more than 6-8 hours at a time, although if I get a good four hours of sleep I can put in another session of that length. However much EV I calculate a play is worth, that calculation presumes an insignificant number of errors. If I play long enough, I make many more errors than I calculated and lose all my edge.

The Cavendish was housed in an office building and one flight up was a small roof that covered a portion of the building. Players frequently smoked marijuana or other substances on the roof and getting an invitation to join them was fairly easy. I didn’t do that very often, but when I did, my results suffered greatly. I am not someone who can smoke a joint and then concentrate on playing the way I need to in order to succeed.

Because of our last election, recreational marijuana is about to be legalized in Nevada. That’s fine for those of you who want that, but for me it’s poison. I’ll stay away. It’s possible that someday I’ll be in sufficient pain that I will take marijuana to help deal with it, but I’ll give up gambling for as long as I’m consuming.

The end of the article tells of the last days of the Cavendish, when voters of the then recently incorporated West Hollywood decided they didn’t want the club in their city. Previously, West Hollywood was a part of the City of Los Angeles. It was said around the club in the 70s and 80s that the mother of the DA (or was it the chief of police?) regularly played gin rummy at the Cavendish, so the club was safe from being raided. That was probably true, but I don’t know which public official, which mother, or even which jurisdiction this applied to. I was just happy that I could play there.

The Cavendish died a couple of years before I moved to Las Vegas. I was sad to see it go, although by that time it was just a time-killer for me. There were relatively few backgammon players at the end and, although I could get into a game where I was a slight favorite (I was a MUCH better player at that time than I was back in 1980 when I had to leave and go get a job), the house rake absorbed most of my edge. Still, it was a pleasant diversion one or two nights a week and I liked that.

When I got to Vegas, there was a backgammon club here. I briefly considered staying active in the backgammon scene, but I already knew I couldn’t support myself playing backgammon in Los Angeles and had heard it was tougher in Las Vegas. No thanks. I decided to stick to games I thought I could beat.

If you read the article, you’ll see a picture of a backgammon board at the top. This is a folding board, sold at toy stores with toy store dice. This is NOT what we used at the Cavendish. In a reply that I sent in response to the article, I explained what the differences are.

The picture is also missing the most important part of the game — i.e. the doubling cube. Without a doubling cube, backgammon is just a game. With a doubling cube, backgammon is a great gambling game.

I suspect my many thousands of hours at the Cavendish helped make me a better gambler today. After you’ve been through many many dozens of winning streaks and losing streaks, it’s easier to keep your balance when you’re in another one.

At the time, especially when I was losing and had to go and get a job, I thought I had “wasted” several years of my life. Today I believe I couldn’t have gotten to where I am today without going through that first. Among other things, the Cavendish introduced me to Richard Munchkin and for that I’m very grateful.