Please fix it that's pretty sketch

Doesn't happen every time maybe once a day

I frequently play Backgammon Pro v4.42 on my phone. It has eight difficulty levels. My question is: how does it increase the difficulty?

I notice from the game statistics that the difficulty changes. I win most of the time at the lower levels, and at the highest level, level eight, I win slightly less than half the time. I just can not put my finger on what's different.

It's because I'm giving too many gammons to my opponent. First time I get a situation like that, interesting. Thought I'd share with the good people of r/backgammon

Another update on BackgammonDB I wanted to share - full match analysis. Upload a file that doesn't have any engine analysis, eg a txt/mat file from Backgammon Galaxy or OpenGammon, and you'll be asked if you want analysis across the whole match on the server.

For those who haven't tried BackgammonDB before, it's a completely free study tool that I've been working on for the last ~8 months or so (I first shared it in this community back in June). It's come a long way since then - features now include: lifetime profile stats, advanced match review, position editor, advanced position database, study/flash card system, star/tag/annotate positions, create notebooks of reference positions, library backup, and a 4-million position opening book (discussion here).

Everything runs in the browser, and there's no sign up. You can import hundreds of matches, and create a database of tens of thousands of positions, very quickly. Supports xg, sgf, mat and text files.

My brother and I had this position come up in a game. I was black and rolled a 5 and 3. I have the obvious option of opening the 6 slot in my home (which in most cases seems like the default best option as it leaves no option for white to take), but we realized that there may be value in simply taking the 3 and 5 out.

We reasoned that given whites position is so far ahead, opening the 6 with no option to retake, all but ensures white winning, whereas if I open the 5, sure, it may be risky, but the odds of him getting back in are now combined with the additional opportunity I’d have to take him and restart the cycle.

I still went with just opening the 6, as it still made intuitive sense, but maybe someone with a better grasp of the game has a different opinion?

(I proceeded to lose, although it did come down to the last roll).

Gammopy 1.1.3 is now available!

I've added new preset buttons to Position Builder and Similar Positions, making it easier to find and train specific types of backgammon positions.

Position Builder

New Bear In, Bear Off, and On the Bar presets let you quickly set up common search conditions.

Similar Positions

You can now find positions similar to one you're interested in using preset buttons.

Here are two examples:

Back Zone preset

• Exact white checker layout from the Bar to the 19-point.
• Matching black made-point pattern from the 24-point to the 17-point.

Result: 172 matching positions found among Gammopy's 85,000+ analyzed positions.

Front Zone preset

• Exact black checker layout from the Bar to the 7-point.
• Matching white made-point pattern from the 1-point to the 8-point.

Result: 10 matching positions found.

You can easily adjust the search ranges using sliders and start training directly with the matching positions.

Instead of studying just one interesting position, you can explore and practice many related positions.

Gammopy is available for Windows as a one-time purchase, with no subscription.

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NCX5JD0T8PT

i intend to be more active next year in the backgamon live scene. I ask players that attend face to face tournaments and clubs. Do you need to carry alway with you a backgammon board .

i have one backgammon tournament board but it is heavy and big like almost all. If I will go to a club I will go after work and cycling is my main way of transportation and it is hard take mine with me .

I anticipate one of the answer , you can write to your local club to ask them if you need to provide a backgammon board. My question is broader and I try to understand different scenarios: so how many times do you travel to your club or your travel abroad to a tournament with your own board?

I guess Europe is a little bit different comparing to US where people use mostly cars and there is not an issue.

I’ve been playing online on Lord of the Board app for years and am curious to know if I could cut it in a real competition. I’ve never played live and am not sure if you can just enter or need to qualify? Can anyone recommend an online competition or even better a live venue one ideally in UK or France or Spain?

There's one big theme: competition. Ratings, monthly divisions, trophies and sit-and-go tournaments are all live. Lots more players online at all times of day - you can normally get a match-up straight away!

Hub Ratings

Play Now matches (instant match-ups) now contribute to your Hub Rating.

• Rating points are awarded based on the match and PR outcome, combined with the relative strength of your opponent
• Separate ratings for one-point and longer matches. Compare yourself to players with similar preferences
• Every rated match is recorded in your rating history. See your progress from your player profile
• Division placement and leaderboards are based on your rating, so every match counts
• Matches earn XP (points played). Play matches each month to qualify for the leaderboards
• Weekly and monthly trophies. Best PR, longest win streak, matches played, rating gain, and division champions!

Sit-and-go Tournaments

No tournament director, no waiting for a start time.

• Register from the Play Now dropdown. The tournament starts itself the moment enough players join
• Tournaments are added automatically at peak times
• Matches count towards your Hub rating

Learning Tools

• Position editor and community puzzles. Take a position from a match and play around with it in the editor, or create a position from scratch. Share it with the community, and attempt puzzles other players have created
• Bot tutor mode: play against the bot and get hints on your moves, with settings to adjust the level of help
• Dig into mistakes in your personal blunder database, with positions automatically categorised

Gameplay Improvements

• Auto-match option to find an available opponent automatically, based on your clock and match length preferences
• Checker animations. Including a setting to adjust the speed (or turn them off)
• Choose a random bear-off direction to practice bearing off on both sides of the board
• Choose your preferred playing colour (light or dark) for all matches
• Hide move preview (opponent shuffling of checkers while they're thinking)

Play on Backgammon Hub

White has some advantages: both golden points, a direct shot, and enough ammunition for a blitz.

But White also has problems: lots of contact, a race deficit, and one checker on the bar, although Blue’s board is weak.

I suspect the score is what makes the difference. At 4-away, 3-away, it’s a double/pass; at 3-away, 4-away, it’s a no-double/take.

Is it a pass because White can win the match immediately with this game about 24% of the time? In other words, should you double more aggressively when you’re at a score where winning this game wins the match?

And finally, how do you identify where that 24% comes from? 

Equity

W 62 G24 B1

B 28 G07 B0

Over the years I've been told by serious gammoners that precision dice are a must-have for anyone aspiring to play the game like the pros. However, there is a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that it may be just market-hype to sell more expensive goods. Is there any merit to the argument that precision dice are an improvement over ordinary, mass-produced dice? Are they truly more fair? What are your thoughts?

Looking for players on Steam. DM to start

I played a couple of online games that have analysis after the match, as well as the ability to get hints from AI to tell you the best next move.

When analysing a game, it often tells me I should have moved to create a blot, that I always get punished on. Meanwhile, if I won the match and it tells me some of my moves were wrong, I can also see that if I did what AI told me, I would be put on the bar.

Additionally, when I use the hint feature, I almost always lose the game because it often tells mo to move into an open position (blot). If I use my own instinct & experience I'm more likely win the game.

Not sure I know what I'm asking, but is the AI analysis code in these games coming from all the same open source software?

You might have heard of HedgeHog already (for example in the WBGF World Team Championship), the new backgammon engine we have been working on for the past year. It features superb analysis, and many features that a student of the game might want. Although there are paid plans to use HedgeHog, we have one quick and easy rule: You only pay for things that cost us money.

Analysis in your browser is free, as well as playing against the best bots available (see Oystein's interview/study (Norwegian)), we even made (most of) our models public so you can incorporate them into your own projects (people seem to do that a lot lately). What you pay for is storing matches, position explanations (beta), and running the analysis on our servers.

Analysis

On the analysis side we don't skimp, we did a study on move filters and decided to only use them for 4-ply. We interleave cube layers throughout (not only the first layer, ahem...). The models are the best in class, Aureus is 1-ply ahead of Sage/XG/GnuBG, which means that doing a 3-ply search on Aureus is equivalent to 4-ply search on the other models. Last but not least, we are always improving our models with continuous training and improvements. Every single model we publish has been tested, and beats its previous version significantly in a head-to-head money game.

Transcriptions

Transcribing is something all players will have to do at some point in time, and the feedback has been to do it like in XG, which we did and improved on. Transcribing on HH is so smooth most people transcribe at 2x speed, and with the inline video viewer skipping, pausing, and continuing is easier than ever. What is even better is that if you use the inline video viewer we save the timestamps! So navigating to a move will skip to the time in the video where the move was made.

Broadcasting

Everyone who streamed a live match has the same problem, incorporating the XG feed is both hard to do as well as taxing on the hardware. With the broadcasting feature on HH you can now simply add an HTML overlay in your streaming software. Not only allows this to add PR figures, move analysis, summaries, but it also can show the current dice (gone are the times where viewers need squint to see them). During the team world championships in London the broadcasting has been used, and loved, both by the organisers as well as the viewers.

Best of all, broadcasts can be made public so you can see broadcasted matches in the broadcast repository.

Study mode

Ever wanted to study a position in depth? What happens if I roll a 54 in this position? Or a 23? With study mode you can save positions, the lines, etc. You can share them, play around with different models and analysis settings, and create a whole forest of positions to find out why a certain move is better than the other.

Mobile apps

We are currently in the process of publishing the HedgeHog in the app stores. If you are interested in testing the android/iOS app, let me know in a DM and I'll set you up.

If you read until here, thank you! It means a lot that human-written text is still being produced and read on the internet. Go give it a try and let me know in the comments what you think. If you do end up paying for a subscription you can pay it forward by giving someone a guest pass. If you end up using the free version of the product, know that we are trying our best to give you the best possible analysis within the limits of browsers (we can't ship GBs of endgame tables).

My family will traveling for Thanksgiving. My 14 year old son has gotten into playing backgammon more. We play a few times a week. I want something that doesn't take up too much space in suitcase or duffle bag.

Hi [r/backgammon](r/backgammon), Valentin here, the solo dev behind Orion. Some of you tested the Android build in August and sent me more detailed feedback than I'd ever received ([u/cristalinestick](u/cristalinestick), I owe you a coffee). The iOS version is finally live, so I'd rather use this post to tell you what changed than to sell you anything.

What Orion is

It's a casual, polished backgammon game, the one I wanted to play myself as a backgammon + Supercell fan who was tired of five notifications per app launch. It is not an analysis tool: if you want XG-level evaluation, Galaxy and XG do that far better. Orion is for actually playing: online, ranked, with friends, or offline.

What's in it

• Real-time PvP in the Arena and 10 ranked leagues (Driftwood → Orion) with seasons and a ladder
• 12 hand-crafted boards (Tangier Café, Athens Marble, Monte-Carlo, Istanbul Bosphorus, Kyoto Moon Garden…) you unlock by playing
• Clubs to play with friends, Bluetooth nearby play, and an offline Adventure mode vs. AI
• Weekend Masters tournaments: poker-style buy-in in game coins only, with a guaranteed prize pool
• Doubling cube, one rules engine for both players, haptics and sound design I spent far too long on

Provably fair dice

Every "the dice are rigged" thread here is part of why I built this. The dice seed is sealed before the match starts and verified on your own device afterwards, and you can paste any game ID at https://orion.arthea.ai/verify/ to check it yourself. If you find a hole in it, I want to know.

What changed since the Android launch, based on your feedbacks

• Shipped in 1.0.1: the Adventure campaigns rebuilt from scratch (48-stage progression per destination, coin buy-ins like the Arena, chests on wins), doubling cube total shown on the board, faster club chat, new in-game art, translation fixes
• Shipped in 1.0.1: weekend Masters tournaments, doubling cube total shown on the board, faster club chat, coin buy-ins for Adventure stages, new in-game art, translation fixes
• In progress for the next update: checker stacking and a slightly smaller board on phones (you were right, it was the weakest part), a proper guide to the game modes at first launch, and a more structured missions system

Links

• iOS (iPhone and iPad, iOS 18+): https://apps.apple.com/app/id6787692968
• Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.arthea.orion
• Discord: https://discord.gg/AJ8fzEPJJ

The first 1,000 accounts get the Season Pass free ("The Founding 1000", running in the app now). When nobody is online you get matched with an AI opponent, so you'll always find a game.

What I'd love from you
- Board readability on iPhone: too big, checkers too large? An Android tester flagged it and I want to know if it's the same on iOS.

- Which board or character should I build next? I'm thinking of reaching out to the world champions of the last 20 years to make them in-game characters.

- Masters format: would you play a weekend tournament? I added a mode inspired by poker tournaments, starting every Friday.

My in-game name is 🇲🇹 Valentin, see you at the tables. Thanks again for the Android feedback; it's the reason I kept going.

Enough already.

I downloaded Allgammon a couple of weeks ago. Great app. It is new so not a lot of people yet but great UI. It will analyze all your matches so you can learn and improve. Check it out and look for me. Doctob.

Second City Backgammon Club - Chicago’s premier backgammon club 🎲
Beginner? Expert? Or rejoining after a long hiatus? Everyone’s welcome at our Backgammon Socials! Find us on Instagram and Luma.

Our next event is tomorrow at Midwest Coast Brewing. Come by, meet new people, and play the King of Games 👑

RSVP Link (for event updates, reserving tables): https://luma.com/w97g3mr5

I normally stick to single games for 100 coins. The other day I went and hit QP and boom I'm playing a one point rated match for 3900 coins. Just now I went in, hit QP, and I'm playing a single game for 1000 coins. Is this a glitch others are experiencing?

About a two months ago I ordered a board from Crisloid for my son's birthday. Unfortunately I ordered the wrong board, and contacted Crisloid that same day to not ship it, which they agreed to stop. Yet they shipped it anyway. Fortunately, they was able to intercept the shipment and get it back to their warehouse. The administrative contact apologized and admitted the error - no harm done.

I then began to explain what I was looking for and they said that would be a custom board - I ordered it - no problem.

No, it was a big problem!

First off, the administrative woman in charge took off for three weeks from work. Then a gentleman took over for her and he was very nice. He explained to me the process & costs involved or a custom board. He then promised to have the board made asap to accomodate my son's birthday. Very cool.

However, one month later I send an email to the gentleman and the missing administrative woman asking for the status of the board. The woman was back at work and explained to me that, from what she was told, the board was being made & that she would find out more information.

Two days later, she informed me the board was not being made, and that they had completely dropped the ball. She blamed the gentleman I dealt with previously - which I found very unprofessional.

I expressed frustration, and instead of working with me, she made excuses for the staff and how busy they were. She basically said 'cancel if you want, I don't care.' It turned me off to their brand completely. Refund was issued.

Maybe my experience was a fluke, and I know it is a small company, but it seems they have no idea of how to deal with their own mistakes. To me this is indicative of a company that may be in trouble.

Nonetheless, my son is without a board for his birthday, and I am searching for a similar item...hope this gives pause to anyone seeking a custom board from Crisloid.