Was backgammon ever seen as sophisticated?

[peccavi]

Anecdotally, back in the 70’s (I guess from what I read in this thread that was when there was a surge in popularity) I ran into an IM (Chess) who I hadn’t seen in a while. He explained that he’d given up hustling chess and was hustling backgammon (primarily in Las Vegas), which was quite lucrative. He explained that if you understood strategy and could calculate based on the position, you could be pretty sure of winning against just about everyone.

[I_Love_Me_Vol.I]

@peccavi

I ran into an IM (Chess) who I hadn’t seen in a while.

For anyone who isn’t up on top-level chess, “IM” means International Master.

[muldoonthief]

@LSLGuy

My roommate and I played a lot. He won most of them which was frustrating for me. Admittedly I played by feel; I knew the strategic concepts qualitatively but didn’t explicitly compute anything while playing.

As an experiment we started writing down the dice rolls as they occurred, then replayed the same sequence of rolls off the paper a couple weeks later but with the players reversed. We waited long enough that neither of us had any memory of that particular game. Like I said, we played lots. He still beat me on the replays at about the same rate. Every one of which was provably me playing his rolls and he playing mine.

IOW, it’s provably a game of skill with some luck injected.

We used to do something similar in my fraternity - we’d play with 2 boards, and each player would play each roll on the opposite board - I’d roll, play my roll on board A, he’d play that some roll on board B, etc. We found that (a) the games would diverge by the third roll or so, and (b) the “better” players won both games a lot more frequently.

[Andy_L]

In his book “Taking Chances” John Haigh discusses strategies for backgammon (both ordinary play and play with the cube) discussing (for example) how to decide how to use the results of dice rolls, etc. https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Chances-Probability-John-Haigh/dp/0198526636

[DPRK]

If you enter a position (and the match/money circumstances) into GNU Backgammon or a similar program, you can click on Analyse and get precise information.

[3AxisCtrl]

@Grrr

if a child that young [10] can play it, I don’t think it quite rises to the level of Chess or Go.

But note that kids younger than 10 - often much younger - play Chess and Go. Sometimes rather well.