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.