Big Brother is rating you - the next generation of online backgammons

Okay, maybe I'm the last person on earth to learn about this. Apologies if I'm selling old news as new news to you then. For me, spending some hours with Backgammon Galaxy (henceforth Galaxy) and with Backgammon Backgammon Studio Heroes (henceforth Heroes) was an eye opener on where online Backgammon is heading.

The two sites are very different. I will review them individually later. For now let's say that Galaxy is fresh, clean, beautiful, but also under construction and lacking many features, while Heroes is bursting with features, but under a presentation layer that looks like Windows 95. Also, the two use the "Big Brother", but very differently.

The "Big Brother" is Extreme Gammon (XG), the PC program that I'm also using here in order to tell you objectively how good Backgammon apps are playing. Like Gnu Backgammon, but much speedier, XG plays a God-like backgammon far above what the best humans can pull off.

Now suppose you can integrate an omniscient Backgammon God like XG into your online site. What would you do?

Backgammon Galaxy

Galaxy goes the non-compromise, clean, beautiful way. Honestly, I sat there in shock and awe when I saw what it does. Unlike every other site (Chess, Go, Backgammon) that I know, it doesn't adjust your online rank upwards when you win a match or downward when you lose a match.

Your rank improves if you

a) win a match

b) have objectively played stronger than your opponent in this match.

Your rank declines in the opposite case - you lose and you have played objectively weaker.

Bummer. 

What this does it it takes the frustration (loser) and embarassed feeling (winner) out of the game, when you win a match against somebody who was outplaying you, but just didn't have luck on her side this time. Because if you win, but performed worse than your opponent, nothing changes.

After a match you get to see a screen that tells you how you fared (e.g. won a 5p match 5:2), and how you performed (e.g. you had an intermediate performance of PR 11, your opponent an experienced performance of PR 9). And then it will tell you how it updated your rating. In our example, nothing will happen. You've beaten your opponent, but she played stronger than you, so the Gods of Backgammon decide you get no reward. Here is their own explanation of their system.

 

Here‘s an example of a „1 point game“ I recently lost. My opponent got the one crown for winning the game. I got the other crown for having played the better moves. As a result, the Galaxy rating of both of us stayed unchanged.

A note on PR: this "performance rating" is an invention of XG that by now is even used to rate and rank the performance of the world's strongest players in BMAB , the Backgammon Masters Awarding Body. The PR reflects the number of errors you objectively make. A "super grandmaster" has a PR of less than 2.5, an advanced player between 6.5 and 10, a newbie 20+. This is, of course, varying largely in different matches. Some matches only give you easy to assess positions, some are so tricky that you blunder over and over (worst: you continuously misjudge whether to double and the situation stays similar for several moves). I've had single games where I was ranked "world champion", I've had single games where I was ranked "distracted". Even Mochy, arguably the strongest human at the time I'm writing this sometimes plays games on "expert" level only.

Of course you can critizise this approach -  in some cases you play in a certain, non-optimal way on purpose, maybe you play against a much stronger player so you play more conservatively, or maybe you're behind and feel the need to play extra aggressive. But in my opinion the advantages, the good feelings you get by removing the "DAMN I WAS SO UNLUCKY" results from the equation, outweigh these massively. And you know that you have to find the objectively best moves to improve your ratings.

Backgammon Studio Heroes

(man this is a clumsy name, I still always have to look it up everytime I write it. Why not just call it "Backgammon Heroes"?)

Heroes goes a more compromising way. It offers you totally normal backgammon matches, albeit with the Gods of Backgammon (XG again) informing you about your skill and luck, which is already good - sometimes you feel that you've been much better but totally out-lucked, only to learn that she wasn't that lucky and you weren't that much better after all.

But Heroes has, among its myriad of match types, a few that are truly special.

 

 

Heroes' match types (in the overall screen; see what I meant about Windows 95?)

 

The coolest one is "PR Match". In this match you play a normal match of backgammon. But the winner is not who won the most points. The winner is who had the better PR in playing the match.

Cool is also "Blundergammon". XG considers a move that is 0.08 points of equity or more worse than the optimal move as a blunder. In this match type, the player who makes the first blunder immediately loses.

So while I personally prefer Galaxy's no-compromise, beautiful, clean approach to ranking, Heroes is also an interesting approach, giving you the traditional backgammon experience (if you want, even without the big XG brother watching you - that's the "plain match"), and lets you choose to play for PR or non-blunders instead of points.

But both sites show how much you can do if you have a god-like engine running in the background of every single match. Do I need to mention that both sites also give you strong XG-based analysis capabilities that help you improve your game. 

Highly recommended. (warning: on an iPhone, Heroes looks like shit, you need a tablet or computer to enjoy the game; Galaxy looks very beautiful on any device, but this I'll cover in reviews later)