Backgammon online

[Tony.T]

I played online poker now for about 3 years
and having played all limits/stakes and
really feel tired of it I would like to
play online backgammon. Truemoneygames.com
for instance, are the players good?
Many full time pros? Tell me, I have no clue!



Thanks in advance!!!



Tony M

[pzhon]

The places to play online backgammon for money are GamesGrid, TrueMoneyGames, and GammonEmpire.

Many of the world's best players play online, particularly on GamesGrid. There are relatively few pros, since there isn't enough money in backgammon to support many pros, but there are plenty of sharks.

Don't trust ratings. Use a bot to analyze your matches and money sessions. Trust the bot to tell you if you are being outplayed.

[Robertie]

Best sites for online money backgammon: GamesGrid (#1 by far), followed by TrueMoneyGames (run by the Snowie developers), GammonEmpire, and WSEX (run by some English bookmakers). If you play for more than $10 a point, you will almost certainly be playing top players who have trained themselves using Snowie and Jellyfish, the two top backgammon programs.

If you're serious about playing for money, you need to get Snowie, both as a learning tool and as a way of analyzing your matches to see if you were unlucky or if you were outplayed. Most sites allow you to save a copy of your session in Snowie format, which you can then download and input into Snowie for analysis. It then gives you the average error rate (in millipoints of equity per move) for both you and your opponent. (You can get the same information for yourself by playing against Snowie for practice and analyzing the session.)

Here are a few guideposts on the error rates:

12 or higher -- beginner
8-12 -- average player at $1/$2 per point
5-7 -- average player at $5 per point; average player in the top section of major tournament.
3-4 -- average player at $10+ per point; top 20-30% of players in major tournaments.
2-3 -- typical opponent at $20-$50 per point; top 10% of all major tournament players.

Hope this helps. You can get Snowie at www.thegammonpress.com online.

Keep in mind that at backgammon, skill dominates much more quickly than at poker. If you're a beginner and you play 20-30 games sessions against a top player, you will come out ahead in very few of them.

[Tony.T]

Thanks boys, really good info!



See you at the tables [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[PLOlover]

Backgammon for money, do you think anyone cheats? Somehow I don't think it would be that hard. And unlike poker, you could just run snowie or jellyfish or the gnu free one on a seperate computer, a laptop, and how would anyone know?

Not only that, but you wouldn't even have to follow the best move or two, but simply blunder check your play.

[bennyk]

Great post, Robertie

bk

[bennyk]

There was some info in a thread a while back which basically said:

- Cheating with a bot would be prohibitively slow and that would be a giveaway since the simple or forced moves would still have to be put into the bot to analyze them.

- If you analyze your game with Snowie/Jellifish/gnubg after you play you will be able to identify a bot by its low error rate.

That's not to say that it doesn't happen. I believe Robertie said he had caught someone once - on a play money site!

bk

[Keres]

You may also want to check out GNU Backgammon at http://www.gnubg.org

Great program and its free.

[Keres]

[ QUOTE ]

Hope this helps. You can get Snowie at www.thegammonpress.com

[/ QUOTE ]

nice, they're based in Arlington Mass like myself. Will now order my bg books through them. Thx for the link.