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Master Class at the BMS(UK)

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The Backgammon Masters Series (BMS) Group organises and facilitates live tournaments in which all matches are clocked, recorded and transcribed, conferring mastership titles and certifying proficiency levels with the fundamental goal of promoting Backgammon as a leading international mindsport. BMS (UK) under the direction of Rick Janowski is the UK branch of this international group and is supported and promoted by the UKBGF.  Contact Rick for more details of these tournaments (the next of which is the weekend of 6-7th June) at rickjanowski@bgmastersab.com

BMS_March_15

At the end of last month I attended my first Backgammon Masters tournament. The format of the tournament is to have 16 players who each play six matches over the weekend. Each match is recorded on video and subsequently analysed using Extreme Gammon.

There are two ways to win. You can win more matches than anybody else or you can achieve the lowest Performance Rating (PR). Your PR is determined by XG where the lower the number the better the player you are. A PR of zero would indicate you are a perfect player (they don’t exist!!). Realistically if you can play to a PR of around 4.0 you are a very good player. If you can play to a PR of around 3.0 you are a very strong player indeed – world champion material. I would estimate that there are no more than ten players in the world who can consistently play to a PR of 3.0 and it may well be fewer than ten.  [Read more…]

Backgammon Proficiency Test & International Team Challenge at UK Open

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Mochy conducting Backgammon Proficiency Exam

We are delighted to confirm that #1 Giant of Backgammon Masayuki “Mochy” Mochizuki will be presenting his Backgammon Proficiency Test starting at 6pm on Friday 19th September – the first day of the UK Open Championship, at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry. This test will follow the UK v Japan Team Challenge, in which our home team of Lawrence Powell, Julian Fetterlein and Raj Jansari will do battle against the Japanese Giants: Akiko Yazawa (current World Backgammon Champion), Michy (World #2) and Mochy himself. The full weekend schedule for the UK Open can be found here.
[Read more…]

London Open 2014 – Match Analysis

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Hippodrome Casino

Raj Jansari v Sean Casey

These are some thoughts from my second round match against Sean Casey in the recent London Open 2014 Professionals’ Tournament on 10th May 2014 at the London Hippodrome Casino in Leicester Square.

The match was recorded and live-streamed with commentary by Falafel and Marcus Wrinch. I obviously couldn’t hear what the commentators were saying at the time but I watched the video of the match a couple of days later (you can find it here if interested). Because of the strength of feeling of the expert comments about some of my moves I felt that I must have played terribly so undertook the game transcription into XG hoping to learn from my deemed mistakes (the match file can be found here). There were definitely quite a few mistakes and some areas in which to improve, but in fact I was quite surprised at everything I actually learned… [Read more…]

Re-Volting Backgammon

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revolting-backgammon

With a population of seven billion, and more and more of them using computers, smartphones and even kettles and toasters with their own microchips, the world will run out of electrons in six years’ time.  That’s the worrying conclusion of Dr. Mustafa Shok of the University of San Serif in Thailand.

Fortunately the so-called “Shock Doc of Bangkok” has come up with a solution based on the science of Chirality.  Using his idea of mirror images we can reduce our need for electrons by up to 50%.  He has dubbed this process “Re-Volting” because of the electrons freed up.

Following on from his pioneering work I have applied it to the backgammon world.
[Read more…]

Those Tricky Double 3s

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backgammon-double-3

I am working hard to remember all of the second roll responses. This has been on my to-do list for about 4 years so it is about time that I actually did it. I am definitely going to have them perfected in time for the London Open.

There are a number of reasons for memorising the 2nd roll responses. I think that the three most important of these are:

  • The opening rolls happen a lot – if you are making even small mistakes then they will add up;
  • Learning how the responses change due to small changes in the position develops positional awareness;
  • The opening responses form a body of reference positions that can inform the rest of your checker play.

As part of my learning I recently tested myself on 609 opening responses (29 common ways of playing the opening roll multiplied by the 21 possible reply rolls).
[Read more…]

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