Gambling online with backgammon.

[Joe826]

Does anyone do this? Seems like bots would be a big problem. I still a huge novice to the game, but I was wondering how long it would reasonable take to play this game profitably for a person of average intelligence and work ethic.

[Blarg]

I don't think people of average work ethics excel at games like this, though people of average intelligence can. You usually have to put in a good amount of obsessive play and study in this type of game.

[pzhon]

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I don't think people of average work ethics excel at games like this, though people of average intelligence can. You usually have to put in a good amount of obsessive play and study in this type of game.

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I disagree, though it depends on what is meant by excel. It's relatively easy to go from novice to the level of the world's top players in 1990 (error rate ~5.0 millipoints per move): Play against a bot and read annotated matches. I think 2 hours a day for 100 days should do it if you have some talent for the game. Today, very few people err less than 3.0 millipoints per move, and those who might have achieved this do study the game a lot.

There were people who studied backgammon obsessively before the bots, but they didn't get good feedback, so they didn't advance to today's level. People gathered a lot of experience that wasn't worth much. For example, people studied take/pass decisions. To try to determine what a position was worth, they rolled it out by hand dozens of times. The results were often wrong by tenths of a point, due to misplays or noise. This misdirected players from recognizing that the heart of the game is the checker play: It is checker play, not cube handling, that distinguishes experts from each other and from nonexperts.

An important habit for all games of skill and chance is to recognize whether you made the right play even though you lost horribly. Without this, many intelligent people get lost in the variance.

[pzhon]

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Does anyone do this? Seems like bots would be a big problem.

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You can play for money on GamesGrid and TrueMoneyGames. You can record your matches/money sessions and analyze them with a bot. Even many of the the fish do this. Avoid anyone who plays more like a bot than any human does. In thousands of matches for money, I have very rarely (twice) encountered someone who might be using a bot to make most decisions, though such cheaters have been caught.

Some people may use bots to help out on an occasional decision. This is still cheating, but it is less worrisome for a good player because weak players usually don't have a good idea which decisions are important and non-obvious. Occasional cheating will not allow a weak player to play like an expert.