Columnist, club member square off as board game's popularity grows
Reprinted from
Oakland Tribune, 2003-05-16
By Rory Laverty, staff writer
I had a choice. I could sit back, fortify my position and try to keep my opponent trapped while I moved out of harm's way, or I could make a run for it, push ahead and try to hit him a couple times on the way home.
Across the backgammon table from me sat Richard McIntosh of Piedmont, a beyond-worthy adversary. As co-leader of the 100-member Backgammon-by-the-Bay club, McIntosh, a wiry and energetic online-game developer, presented something I never before had faced: Somebody who actually knew what he was doing on a backgammon board.
The game got under my skin during my freshman year in college, when my buddies and I were quarantined in an all-male dorm known as "Psycho Ward." We played for eight-hour stretches after class, making up the rules along the way.
Even after winning and losing legions of pizzas and six-packs, I'm barely an intermediate when compared to the Backgammon-by-the-Bay experts. McIntosh himself claims only to be an advanced intermediate, even though he's been playing competitively since 1995.
At noon Sunday at the Shattuck Hotel in Berkeley, the club is holding its monthly backgammon tournament.
[Editor's note: tournament dates have changed; see the schedule for details.]
The Bay Area's best players, already ranked based on their prior performances, will pay entry fees between $15 and $80 (depending on the level at which they're competing) to try their luck and skill against other worthy players.
McIntosh was nice enough to meet me for a couple of games at his Berkeley office. From the moment I sat down, it was obvious that I couldn't beat him with skill. In fact, after each of my moves, at my request he informed me whether he would have done the same thing, and if not, what he would have done instead. So our match-up was more tutorial than showdown.
Fortunately for me, though, backgammon's like life: Skill only gets you so far. By rolling a few doubles and capitalizing on my opponent's run of bad luck, I kept him trapped in my home quadrant until the end of the game, when I cleared my last piece from the board before he could remove any of his. David gammoned Goliath. And it was good.
But the crucial thing to understand about backgammon is that it's a game you play for 80 years, not twice. Luck may fluctuate in the short term, but over time the laws of probability bear out.
Part of the battle is just to play enough times to get a sense of what certain board positions mean and when you should double a bet. And now there's a way to improve one's skills with or without a playing partner: In the online backgammon community, players are progressing far beyond what the rest of the world knows or even imagines about the game, using computer programs to analyze odds.
Backgammon has long been played everywhere from Iraqi tea-shops to Texas honky-tonks, but since 1995 its following has grown quickly because of the Internet. At least eight gaming sites currently offer backgammon.
McIntosh himself runs www.GamesGrid.com, an online backgammon and gin rummy site that allows players not only to compete against each other or the computer but also to calculate odds and analyze various positions on the board.
"It's definitely growing," McIntosh says of backgammon. "Or I guess it would be more accurate to say there's been a 'resurgence of interest.'... In our club we have young players -- our youngest regular is 10 -- and we have people all the way into their 70s, so it's a broad spectrum. And because of the Internet, we now have a much better ability to congregate and maintain people's interest."
The club holds two tournament events each month: One in Berkeley and another in Scott's Valley, near Santa Cruz. [Editor's note: the second event is now in Cupertino; see the schedule for details.] They're looking into opportunities to set up matches against clubs in other regions for match-play showdowns. When I told McIntosh my plans to move to southeast North Carolina this summer, he said, "They have a club there!"
The tournaments are open to spectators, and casual players will have chances to play in low-pressure games.
If you don't have a head for numbers, that's OK; just remember that when you roll the dice, your chance of getting a particular number between 1 and 6 is 30 percent (11 of 36). From there it gets more complicated, and that's why the game stays fun -- whether you're playing for one afternoon or a lifetime.
Me, I'm in it for the long haul, because I can't think of any better way to waste an afternoon than facing a buddy over a backgammon board, planning each other's abject and preferably humiliating defeat.
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