Short matches are fun and they don’t require a lot of time to play. At the time of writing I’ve played 139 3-point matches on Galaxy this year (I’m playing as “Hallberg”). In this blog I’ll go through some of the things these matches brought to light.
Catching up
Since last blog a lot of stuff happened. I went to the 7th Merit Open in Northern Cyprus with my girlfriend to play the tournament. The results were mediocre but the tournament and surroundings were awesome. We immediately booked a room for the fall tournament in 2020.
Late 2019 I started in a new job managing IT-outsourcing – now from a customer perspective. Most of my career in IT-outsourcing has been delivering IT-services and I thought it would be interesting to experience receiving them. This meant less time for hobbies where my favorite pastime was playing strategy games on my tablet. Instead I chose to spend the little free time I had on playing 3-point matches online.
Playing online
My two main purposes of playing online is to
- get input for where to put my effort when learning from my mistakes (keywords: Strategical errors, technical errors, time management)
- practice regularly to an extend where I’ll never be rusty when going to a real life tournament (keywords: Flow, intuition, speed, repetition).
There are many different speed settings and I chose to go with 1 minute per point in the time bank plus 10 seconds per move (“Normal” speed). I think that this mimics the speed of making decisions in a real life match in the best way.
I typically accept challenges from anyone but I rarely get challenges from higher rated players. There seem to be only one solution to that problem and that is to become higher rated myself. Recently I changed my policy of playing everyone to only play against players within 250 rating points. It removes a lot of the variance of being run over in a simple game by a significantly lower rated player loosing 20+ rating points, standing to gain only 6 points when winning. Below is a graph showing how much you win or lose with a certain rating difference in 3-point matches on Galaxy.
I also plotted my opponents’ PR in the below table and they are following a nice trend. Looking at the 1400-1500 groups we see that they are playing significantly below expectation which I believe is due to new inexperienced players starting at 1500 not having found their level yet. The same goes for the 1500-1600 group where good players are on their way up to find their right level. The bump at the 2000-2100 level is due to a player losing on time getting a huge PR penalty.
Thinking about the 3-point match
Since I started playing backgammon back in 1995 I’ve gone through some phases regarding match and money game. In the early years I preferred match play for the sake of all the adjustments. Later on I realized that for focusing on understanding the strategy of the game money game is much better because you remove the “noise” of having to adjust for match score. In the later years where my activity level has been very low I only played a few games of money game with XG on my phone. In the few real life matches I played over those years I got so many huge mistakes because I forgot to adjust for match score.
The 3-point match is interesting because you don’t play like money game in any of the match scores. This forces me to think and be aware of the score all the time. You have it all: Double Match point, Gammon Go and Gammon Save. Naturally this will show if you are capable of making the proper adjustments. I have not succeeded yet.
Before I stared I expected to play around 5.0 in PR i 3-point matches. Most likely a little below. After 139 matches I’ve played on average 5.3. Split up in checker play and cube action I played 4.6 in checker play decisions alone and 10.5 in cube actions alone. A good rule of thumb is that cube is typically double of checker play. I’ll continue to play 3-point matches until I reach an average PR of 4.5 over 100 matches. Then I’ll switch to 5-point matches.
Strategical errors
Typically these errors are quite big and sometimes huge blunders. Most of the improvement in PR should come from these.
Priming games are difficult in general. It often takes courage to play the right moves and they can be very difficult to spot under time pressure. One common theme is that I typically underestimate how difficult it is to escape a prime. This leads to a lot of mistakes where I
- take a cube where it’s much harder to escape than I thought.
- do not double because I believe that my opponent will easily run away.
- do not activate my rear checkers when starting to get primed.
- do not play hard enough for a prime myself.
Example 1: Priming game (late to the party)
General observations
- In 0-1/3 you double very aggressively especially if there are gammon chances
- A little bit down in the race
- Both having two checkers back
- Both having 5-primes
- White has better timing
I viewed the position as having an advantage but not decisive. Black is closer to the edge of the prime and I’m only 9 pips behind. Not a lot of timing. What I clearly underestimated was how much time I actually have to move my three outfield checkers around waiting for Black’s position to fall apart.
It was a huge blunder not to double and an even bigger mistake if Black took the cube! So a huge D/P at the match score. From 0-0/3 it is still a huge double but now also a clear take.
Example 2: Priming game (defending by attacking)
General observations
- 0-0/3 you double early and pass early
- Up 30 in the race
- Both anchored up
- Black owns the cube
- Seems like an equal game
With the roll 64 it is clear that you have to jump the prime. There are two options. Running all the way with 21/11 or playing 21/15 6/2*.
My thought process was something like this. The advantage of running all the way is that you run a small risk of being hit and you are ready to jump the prime next time. By hitting on the deuce point I will give both deuces and threes to hit and even potentially send another checker behind the prime. Should be clear?! I ran and got a huge blunder (-0.141) for that.
After thinking about it more I got to the conclusion that I highly overvalued my chances of jumping the prime next time if I get the chance. By giving Black the whole roll it is much easier to attack me while making a point (or jump my prime) at the same time. Hitting on the deuce point prevents Black from launching a really strong attack against me.
Example 3: Priming game (over-adjusting)
In the below example the score is 0-0/3. White is on the bar and thinking about a cube.
General observations
- In 0-0/3 you double early and pass early
- 48 pips down
- Black not at the edge of the prime
- 5-prime is very strong
- White has bad numbers from the bar.
My thought process was something like this. If I enter and jump out with one checker it will be very difficult for Black to take. Only 33, 31 and 22 are bad. The 9 dancing numbers are of course not great either. If black rolls an ace it would have to be played 23/22 not building the board at the same time. The race is not that important because I’ll most likely get the outfield control along with my 5-prime.
I doubled and my opponent passed. Most likely I would have accepted the cube myself. It looks like a reasonable take. Things still need to go well for White before Black is in trouble.
To my big surprise this turned out to be a huge (-0.135) no-double/take. But why?
Thinking a bit more about it I realized that the dancing numbers are actually really bad too. It gives Black time to either roll an ace or build a point in the board gaining even more time on me. It is also more difficult for me to move freely against a stronger board. Look at the next 4 variations of position 1 for how much better you need to be to cube.
Contact value when slightly behind in the race. The rule of thumb is that you should go for more contact when you are behind and less contact when you are ahead in the race. This can lead to big mistakes when you are close in the race. I undervalue contact value in those situations. Often I break contact too early when not needed and sometimes I wait too long to run to maintain my racing chances.
Example 4: Contact value (slightly behind in the race)
General observations
- 0-0/3 you double early and pass early
- 1 pip behind in the race after the move
In general White should not break contact being behind in the race after the move. When the race is this close I don’t like to end up being stuck on the opponents bar point potentially being squeezed of it or have to bury checkers to avoid running. For that reason I chose to play 18/14(2), 13/9(2). This is almost a blunder (-0.067). The natural looking 13/5(2) is of course the best.
Technical errors
In general these errors are not big but there should be very few of them. Unfortunately seeing these moves quickly is one of the things that disappears when not in shape.
I will not go through them in this blog (maybe in a later blog) but here are the three categories where I drop equity that should not happen:
- Duplication
- Minimizing shots
- Tempo hitting
If you liked this blog please give it a thumbs up and share. Until next time, take care.
Hey PH, fed blog, jeg må smutte, skal se X-factor. Mvh