Backgammon: the cruelest game provides a guide to some key principles of backgammon, and contains analysis of several games between top players. It also gets philosophical about the vicissitudes of randomness that make backgammon so challenging and intriguing:

From the start there is a complicated interplay of possibilities, probabilities, good fortune and bad, which influences every facet of the game. in backgammon, to seek position is to take certain calculated risks, and because all players are ruled by the dictates of the dice- or by chance, which Karl von Clausewitz, the ninetheenth-century military theorist, described as “an agency indifferent to the actor’s preference for the outcomes” – no player is ever in control of his particular destiny. One of the game’s chief tactics, then, is to shield oneself against the dice. The player with the strongest position can withstand the greater number of unfavorable rolls, or “bad luck,” than can the more weakly protected player, who, because he failed to protect himself, is more easily assaulted and overrun.

Nonetheless, no matter how cunningly you play, you are virtually always vulnerable. One unexpected horror roll can undermine the best positions, and derange the most sensible of plans; this is bot hthe charm and the frustration of the game. The best players know they must employ the craftiest of tactics, not because of the dice, but in spite of them. It is the enormously high luck factor in backgammon that causees it to be a game of skill. Without luck or accident, the game would not only be monotonous, but infinitely less skillfull.

In backgammon, to be skillful is to be self protective. At any given point in the ggame, the better players are aware of Murphy’s Law, which states that if anything can go wrong, it will.” Given the whimsical nature of the dice, all players have a chance in the game, but some players have more chances than others, because they have created in environment in which the more propirious is more likely to occur.

In backgammon, an understanding of the correct percentage moves in specific situations qualifies as “inside information” and will enable you to win in the long run. But not every time, alas, and often nt even in what you believe to be crucial games. This condition must be accepted philosophically, of course, and should not deter you from continuing a detailed study of the game.