Concepts for improving your game

Commitment

For more that 20 years I have been a part of communities where people play games. Some of these people are highly successful and some are not. What is the difference between them?

I see at least four important factors:

• Time spent: It takes a lot of time and practice to become good.
• Agony of losing: People who really hate to lose will tend to go the extra mile to avoid the upsetting defeats.
• Structured learning: Make sure that your hard work does actually give you a specific result. If it’s not specific, then it is probably not structured good enough.
• Having success is more important than not failing: The people are going for the gold and not satisfied with less.

Mindset

Some years back I had a talk with a really strong backgammon player who told me that he had a good explanation of why I struggled so much with improving to become a very strong player. His theory was that I didn’t care enough about correcting my mistakes. To begin with I was kind of offended because I felt that it was untrue and unfair. In his mind you either make the right decision or you work on understanding why you made a wrong decision. No in-between.

That was where I understood that I’ve been having the wrong focus by trying to only work on the really bad decisions. I was never really challenged in understanding the details of the game because I expected my progress  to come from not being bad instead of being the result of trying to be good.

Developing your backgammon skills

My approach to understanding backgammon can best be viewed as a pyramid.

Start learning from the top and add new knowledge from the next level when you are done with the previous level. If you start learning technique you will have a really hard time understanding when and how to use it because you don’t have enough grasp on concepts or even game plans.

When you start out as a new player try to establish what the main objectives of the game are. Then move on to learn the game plans and what relation these have to the main objectives. Later you can look at some concepts and again try to understand how those are related to what you’ve learned about main objectives and game plans. It is the relation part that challenges most players. It’s relatively easy to learn a new concept, but to understand how it fits into everything else is difficult. This is where the hard work and structured learning comes in.

Good luck with your training. See you at the tables.