58 Fun Facts About Backgammon

In which TV drama's pilot does John Locke explain backgammon to a boy as two sides, light and dark?

Lost: Locke calls backgammon 'the oldest game in the world', five thousand years old, an age that fits the game boards dug up in Mesopotamia far better than backgammon itself, first recorded in seventeenth-century England.

How many points, the triangular spaces, does a backgammon board have in total?

24: twelve narrow triangles line each side, six to a quadrant, and a piece that is hit has to start the whole track again from the far end.

In backgammon, what is removing your pieces from the board at the end of the game called?

Bearing off can start only once all fifteen of your pieces are home, and if one is hit along the way it must travel right round the board before you may resume.

In backgammon, what is a piece sitting alone on a point called?

A blot is exposed: an opposing piece that lands on it sends it to the bar, and its owner can move nothing else until it has re-entered through the opponent's home board.

How do the two players' pieces travel around a backgammon board?

In opposite directions: each player's home is where the other's journey begins, so the two sides must pass through each other, and that contact is what makes hitting possible.

In backgammon, what must a player do if one of their two dice lands tilted on a piece?

Throw both again: a roll counts only if both dice come to rest flat in the right-hand half of the board, so one cocked die voids the pair.

Which backgammon win counts double?

A gammon, won when the loser has not taken a single piece off, counts double, and a backgammon triple if the loser still has a piece on the bar or in the winner's home board, so a player far behind races to get one piece off.

In backgammon, what happens when a player rolls doubles?

The number is played four times: a 5-5 gives four separate moves of five, so a 6-6 carries a player eight times as far as the weakest roll, 2-1.

Which numbers are on the six faces of a backgammon doubling cube?

2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64: the cube is a marker and is never rolled, and because redoubles are unlimited the stake can climb past its highest face to 128 and beyond.

At the start of a backgammon game, the doubling cube sits between the players showing which number?

64 is showing while the cube waits in the middle; either player may then offer the first double, but only at the start of a turn, before rolling the dice.

In which Roger Moore Bond film does 007 beat the villain at backgammon using the villain's own loaded dice?

Octopussy: Bond turns Kamal Khan's trick dice against him in India, and Khan later sums him up as an Englishman who likes 'eggs, preferably Fabergé, and dice, preferably loaded'.

Which point on a backgammon board is sometimes nicknamed the "golden point"?

Fifth: the five-point earned its golden nickname because it is rated the best place on the opponent's side to anchor, and a very strong point to make early on your own.

In backgammon slang, which roll is known as "boxcars"?

Double sixes: boxcars is the longest move in the game, but it cannot be declined, and every six that can legally be played must be, welcome or not.

In backgammon, if you can play either die but not both, which must you play?

The higher die must be played; a player may not duck part of a roll, and whenever some sequence uses both numbers, that sequence is compulsory.

In backgammon, what officially ends a player's turn, ruling out any more take-backs?

Picking up the dice ends the turn; until then there is no touch-move rule as in chess, and a player may try a move, put the pieces back and play something else.

In backgammon money play, what is an immediate redouble after accepting a double called?

A beaver leaves the cube with the player who turned it and the stake at four times its starting value; the original doubler may reply with a raccoon, doubling it yet again.

In backgammon slang, what does a player do when a roll fails to bring a piece in from the bar?

Dance: a player who dances loses the whole turn, and once the opponent holds all six home-board points there is no roll that can come in at all.

Which backgammon money-play rule lets double and triple wins count only once the cube has been turned?

Jacoby: the bridge champion Oswald Jacoby proposed the rule so that a player far ahead would double and end the game instead of dragging it out in hope of a bigger win.

Which Roman emperor wrote a book on the dice-and-board game alea and had a board fitted to his carriage?

Claudius: Suetonius records the book and the travelling board, and a satire attributed to Seneca has him sentenced after death to rattle dice for ever in a box with no bottom.

In backgammon, what is a chouette?

Three or more players, one versus a team: the lone player, called the box, takes on a side led by a captain, and the seats rotate after every game.

What is a "prime" in backgammon strategy?

A wall of pieces on consecutive points: six in a row makes a full prime, which no piece can jump, because a single die never moves a piece more than six.

In backgammon, what does a player's pip count measure?

Total distance left to travel: every piece counts the points it must still cover to leave the board, so both sides start at 167 and whoever has the lower count leads the race.

On the last roll of a backgammon game, a player should take a double with at least what chance of winning?

25%: passing costs one point for certain, while taking means playing for two, so a player who wins one such game in four comes out exactly even.

Doubling revived backgammon in the 1920s and was taken up early at the Racquet and Tennis Club of which city?

New York: nobody knows who invented doubling; one classic history credits 'some unknown genius' in an American club, while a 1931 magazine piece traced it to a game played in Paris in 1926.

Backgammon is first recorded by name in the 1640s, during the reign of which English monarch?

Charles I was on the throne when the word first appears, spelled 'baggammon'; the game itself had taken shape in England only a generation or so earlier.

Which playwright mocks a courtier who "chides the dice in honourable terms" while playing at tables?

William Shakespeare: in Love's Labour's Lost, Berowne sneers that the smooth Boyet is polite even to his dice, and 'tables' then named the whole family of such games, as the word backgammon is not recorded until the 1640s.

Who published A Short Treatise on the Game of Back-Gammon in 1743?

Edmond Hoyle wrote it a year after the whist treatise that made his name, and his rulings on games carried such weight that 'Hoyle' became shorthand for the rule book.

A tavern wall painting from which Roman town shows two dice players quarrelling in mid-game?

Pompeii: in the next scene the landlord orders the brawling pair outside. Romans rolled three dice, not two, in the board game that was a forerunner of backgammon.

On the precision dice used in serious backgammon, how are the pips finished?

Filled flush with the face: precision dice are made to weigh the same on every side, with no dimples, and serious players roll them from a lipped cup to keep the throw honest.

In an old Arab tradition, the backgammon board, with its points, pieces and dice, stands for what?

The calendar year: the thirty pieces are read as the days of a month, and the dice supply the seven days of the week.

Which crusader king of France issued a decree in 1254 forbidding his officials and subjects to play tables games?

Louis IX, the future Saint Louis, banned the game for his court officials and then for everyone else, one episode in a long and losing war the Church waged on gambling at the board.

A tables board and counters were recovered from the wreck of which famous 17th-century warship?

The Vasa sank minutes into her maiden voyage in 1628 and was raised in 1961 with thousands of her crew's everyday belongings preserved, a tables board and its turned wooden counters among them.

What is a spectator at a backgammon game called?

A kibitzer watches from the side and is notorious for passing comment, which is exactly what etiquette forbids within earshot of the players.

The Royal Game of Ur, a possible ancestor of backgammon, was unearthed in the 1920s by which archaeologist?

Leonard Woolley dug the inlaid boards out of the Royal Cemetery at Ur, but how to play them stayed a mystery until a far later clay tablet setting out the rules was deciphered.

Which Russian-American aristocrat is dubbed the "Father of Modern Backgammon"?

Prince Alexis Obolensky staged the first international tournament in 1964, and the boom it helped set off made backgammon boards a fixture of clubs across North America.

In which city was the first backgammon tournament to carry the title World Championship held, in 1967?

Las Vegas: the Sands Hotel, long the Rat Pack's stage, hosted it three years after the game's first international tournament had shown there was a crowd for it.

Who won the first backgammon tournament to be billed as the World Championship, in 1967?

Tim Holland won the title twice more, then built a career on it, writing instruction books that began with a guide for beginners and opening the Park 65 backgammon club in 1978.

Which resort became the home of the World Backgammon Championship in 1979?

Monte Carlo had been running a rival European championship while the Americans played theirs in the Bahamas, until the promoter Lewis Deyong proposed merging the two.

Paul Magriel, author of what many call the bible of backgammon, was known by which nickname?

X-22 was, by Magriel's own account, the winner of a private tournament he once played out among sixty-four imaginary entrants, whom he labelled X-1 to X-64.

Paul Magriel wrote a weekly backgammon column for which newspaper from 1977 to 1980?

The New York Times ran the column from June 1977 to July 1980, and partway through the run Magriel went out and won the 1978 world championship.

In the 1982 case State of Oregon v Barr, a judge cleared a tournament director after ruling backgammon a game of what?

Skill: Paul Magriel testified that nothing in backgammon is hidden, so whoever uses the information best will win, and Judge Stephen Walker acquitted Ted Barr of promoting gambling.

Gerald Tesauro developed TD-Gammon, the 1990s neural-network backgammon program, at which company?

IBM: Tesauro's program reached master strength within a few years, and its analysis overturned opening plays that experts had made almost automatically for thirty years.

How did the 1990s program TD-Gammon mainly learn backgammon?

By playing itself: it began with random moves, in games that dragged on for hundreds or thousands of turns, and with no expert games to copy it still grew to rival world-class players.

Which backgammon variant, small enough to be solved by computer, gives each player only three pieces?

Hypergammon: with so few pieces in play, Hugh Sconyers was able to compute the exact value of every one of its 32 million or so positions, so a machine can play it perfectly.

The backgammon variant acey-deucey is a longtime favourite of which US armed service?

The Navy: sailors took to a game that turns backgammon's worst roll, 1-2, into the best, worth an extra move of any double the player cares to name and then another turn.

Plakoto, Fevga and Portes are three tables games played in sequence in Greece under which name?

The Turkish variation is called Tavla, while Gul bara and Tapa are popular in south-eastern Europe.

The Eastern Mediterranean name Shesh Besh combines words for six and five from which two languages?

Persian and Turkish: shesh is Persian for six and besh Turkish for five, and Arab players in the region's cafes call out their rolls in this hybrid count instead of in Arabic.

Which Syrian city became famous from the early 19th century for its wooden marquetry backgammon sets?

Damascus: the game, Syria's antiquities chief said in 1988, 'became the rage of the Ottoman Empire', spread across the Arab world with the Turks and 'stayed behind when they left'.

How did the old French game trictrac chiefly differ from backgammon?

It was scored on points: players earned them for particular throws and positions, so the race home counted for little in this favourite of French high society before the Revolution.

Which backgammon opening tactic, leaving a lone piece on a point to cover next turn, did computer analysis call into question?

Slotting: experts long answered an opening 4-1 or 5-1 by risking a lone piece inside their home board, until TD-Gammon's rollouts showed that splitting the back pieces did better.

Which of these backgammon programs is free, open-source software?

GNU Backgammon, gnubg for short, is the work of many volunteers, not a company, so anyone may read, copy and improve the code behind its neural-network play.

Among casual backgammon players in which country is a five-piece limit on any point a common house rule?

Britain: the limit belongs to a variant known as Old English backgammon, whereas the standard rules let a player pile as many pieces on a point as will fit.

Which backgammon rule bars the doubling cube for one game once a player is one point from winning the match?

The Crawford rule protects the leader: a player one point from losing the match has nothing to lose by doubling at once, which would otherwise halve the work of catching up.

What was the backgammon program BKG 9.8 the first computer to do?

Beat a world champion: in 1979 Hans Berliner's program won 7-1 against Luigi Villa, though Berliner's own analysis judged Villa the better player and the program lucky with the dice.

What is the strategy of holding two or more anchors deep in the opponent's side while far behind in the race?

A backgame player clings to both anchors for as long as possible, hoping to hit a late shot while the opponent struggles to bring the last pieces home safely.

Under backgammon's standard rules, who decides whether a player's illegal move stands?

The other player can accept the play as made or demand a legal one, and simply rolling the dice for their own turn counts as accepting it, so an unnoticed slip stands.

In backgammon, what does the winner of the opening roll-off use for the first move?

The two dice just thrown: each player rolls one die, the higher roller moves with both numbers, and ties are rolled again, which is why a game can never open with a double.

Which old Japanese dice game is a close relative of backgammon?

Ban-sugoroku later died out in Japan, so today the word sugoroku nearly always means a picture board game played like snakes and ladders.