Bad luck in Backgammon

Recently I thought about luck in backgammon, particularly bad luck. Don't you hate it when the dice roll exactly the way you don't want them to? Don't you love it if you need a 51 to turn the game around and you get... a 51! Wouldn't you want that bad luck gone in the game?

I ended up with two experiments with XG2:

Experiment 1: The perfectly lucky game!

Suppose you take out all luck from Backgammon by always rolling the best possible dice. A joker every move.  Wouldn't that be cool? How would the game look like?

It turns out that the perfectly lucky game (for both sides) is incredibly boring.

(For the details on how to get XG2 to play the perfectly lucky game, look below)

Here's the transcript. Brace yourself for some serious boredom.

1) 31: 8/5 6/5

Luckier than the other good candidates like 61, 42, 65.

1) ... 66: 24/18(2) 13/7 (2)

This leads to this position:

 In this position, 66 isn't the best roll you can get - the 7 point and the 18 point are made by white so it would actually be very awkward to roll a 66 now. The best roll here is 44.

2. 44: 24/20(2) 13/9(2)

Now, again, 66 isn't the best roll for white because you can't bring the back men on 18 home with it. The joker now is 55.

2. ... 55: 18/8(2)

And here we're at the end of our game already. Blue's joker is, obviously, 66, bringing home the two checkers on 20 and turning the game into a pure racing game, where always 66 is the joker, and where white wins because blue rolled only a 31 and a 44 where white rolled a 55 (in addition to 66 rolls).

For completeness:

3. 66: 20/8(2) 

3. ... 66: 13/7(2) 13/1

And the two groups are separated. In the further "battle of the 66", white wins like this:

Now that wasn't too dramatic, was it? I was expecting great swings, dramatic luck, but all I got was boredom (NB I got the great swings - the game's analysis cycled between "white wins" and "equal" for most of the time, but the game was just boring). Also notice that there wasn't any close decision here, all was straightforward. Seems the joker typically leads to a very straightforward move.

Conclusion: too much luck is boring :-)

Experiment 2: my "Luckgammon" variation 

Considering what to do to reduce bad luck in Backgammon I thought of this variation:

Instead of rolling and moving, you roll three times, and pick the roll that is most lucky. Then you move.

(For the setup how to achieve this with XG2 look below)

The idea behind this is that it keeps some randomness in the game, but you never roll those awful anti-jokers and you hit a good or very good roll nearly always.

Now these games have to be taken with a good grain of salt - XG2's perfect play is tailored for the normal backgammon; if you can roll 3 times, the probability to hit a checker, to enter a 4-point board etc are vastly higher than what XG believes, so the best move is probably different to what you believe. Even the luckiest move might be different than in normal BG, so my method of selecting the luckiest move is slightly flawed as well, or isn't it? Tricky.

Anyway, I played four games like this. Believe me, it is TEDIOUS to play these games. See separate post for the details. Two games I played "me vs XG2", two I played "XG2 vs itself". All four games were, again, fairly boring. Not as boring as the joker game, but still nothing compared to the drama you get in plain, normal, ordinary Backgammon. Actually I had difficulties picking good positions to show you, positions where a tricky decision has to be made, a position where an ingenious move has to be found, where you have to see the right game plan. There's not much there.

Bad luck is the icing on the Backgammon cake, it seems

Now four games isn't representative for sure, but still, after playing these games it seems to me that my Luckgammon isn't so much fun. It seems that without the occasional really poor move, without figuring out what's the best you can do with an awkward roll, without the frustration of dancing four times in a row, the game gets shallow and stale.

So the next time you bite into your keyboard in frustration over that poor roll or in anger over your opponent, of course, hitting you, although there were only 4 of 36 rolls that would allow him that, maybe it helps you to know that the tough luck makes this game the fun that it is :-)

Appendix: How to get XG2 to always roll the perfect roll

1. Start a new game transcription
2. For every move, do the following:
1. click on the last move that was made. You should see XG's analysis with the best moves and their equity. 
2. Right-click on the best move, select "Dice Distribution".
3. On the tab "dice map", pick the reddest roll - this is the roll that is your anti-joker for the next move, i.e. the joker for your opponent for the next move.
4. Go back to the current move, manually roll the roll you've seen as joker in step (3) 
5. Hit CTRL-H to get a hint, if necessary, use XG Roller+/++ to make sure you pick the right move. Do the best move in XG's list.
   

For the first move I had to try out the various good rolls because XG won't show you any info before the first roll, so I selected all good rolls (65, 42, 61, 31) and looked at XG's luck rating after the roll, and picked the one with the highest luck after the roll - 31. 

Appendix: How to get XG2 to play Luckgammon

First, start a new game transcription. Make sure you can easily distinguish the two players (e.g. by calling them the colors of their checkers). 

 

Then for every move do the following:

1. Hit "R" to roll a random roll. Have the "Overview" panel open and note the roll and the luck value of the current player. Do this for 3 times. Pick the roll with the highest luck value.
   (special case: if you've got a checker on the bar, and your roll dances, you have to hit "T" to take back the roll, twice, to get back to your current roll)
   
2. Hit "T" to take back the current roll, enter the roll you picked as manual roll.
3. Do your move, maybe using CTRL-H to get a hint of XG2 on what to move.