Hi! Welcome to my Backgammon info

In this blog...

I'll post about Backgammon. Particularly I'll cover Backgammon apps for iOS, and write about Backgammon and Computer Backgammon once in a while as well.

Backgammon is one of the most underestimated board games. Many play it for fun without much thinking. After all, you roll the dice in every move. There cant' be much about it except for randomness and luck, right?

However, if you try out some of the best apps (that I'll review in this blog), you'll see that they will destroy you over and over. And over. And you'll learn that despite rolling dice, Backgammon is full of strategies and tactics, full of hard decisions, and, foremost, full of patterns to know and full of accurately estimating probabilities.

To start with the conclusion: for iOS there are some excellent apps, apps that give you a world-class opponent and teacher and apps that allow you to play against other Backgammon fans around the world. And the best have both. But: there are also some really poor apps, apps that want your money, apps that want to flood your brain with ads. I'll talk about those as well.

My first review in the next post here will cover the first "world class" Backgammon iOS app I ever used, and an app that I still play regularly. The wonderful Backgammon NJ.

Why...

would you want to read this blog? I'm not an expert at Backgammon. The apps tell me I'm "advanced", which is okay, I guess. On a good day, and with luck, I can beat a top backgammon app in a match to 13 points. But I know about how the top backgammon apps work, I know about neural nets and backgammon apps, about the history starting with Jellyfish Backgammon (yes, I'm an old fart, I used Jellyfish when it was new, decades ago), and I've read enough Backgammon books to talk about this and that. I hope you'll enjoy the ride :-)

Oh yes and I'm proud owner of "extreme gammon 2" for the PC, probably the best backgammon player on this planet, and I'm using it to find out how strong apps play whenever this is humanly possible. (and gnu bg as well to check whether XG cheats when e.g. evaluating the strength of XG mobile :-) ).