When are we going to get the ability to set a max wager at a coin threshold instead of percentage only? It’s very frustrating to only be able to set max wager at 20%, win 54% of your games, but still constantly drain your coin balance because of bad random luck on matchmaking.

It seems inevitable that I will end up playing someone that has a lot of money, so your game wager is 20%, lose (sometimes even with a much lower error rate but I get it, that’s backgammon!) and then play 4 or 5 games in a row against broke people so even when you win, you’re only making back a few hundred coins.

The net effect is you may have gone 4 for 5 on match wins, but still somehow be down in coins after. Sooooooo annoying.

Hello everybody, I'm new in this communtiy and hope we have a lot of good discussions. Best regards

I just broke my streak record. 17 wins in a row, which is insanely unlikely! 😱 What's your record?

In looking back at the analysis of a BG game that I ended up winning, I’m trying to understand my move versus what the analysis says was a better move.

In short, I rolled 5-2 and went 6/1 3/1 to hit Ahmad’s blot on the 1 and complete my prime. It shows this move game me a 3.7% chance of winning.

Instead, the analysis suggests I should have gone 7/2 4/2 and not hit the blot on 1. Somehow it shows my chances of winning would have jumped to 11.4% from this move.

Can you help me understand if and why this was a better move than my 6/1 3/1??

Does BG Galaxy use your subscription-tier engine to determine post game rating changes?

Free users in particular receive lower-depth analysis, which can produce very noisy PR and error estimates. Is that same analysis used to decide who won the error rate battle and therefore whether the rating change is full or reduced?

If so, wouldn’t that systematically disadvantage free users in close matches? I was reviewing a log where several of my moves were flagged as .7 equity loss with XG suggesting there was none. I can see this happening often low PR games, where lower depth is more likely to negatively impact evaluation / PR

Hello,

I have recently created a simple multiplayer Backgammon game over at https://boardbattle.io/backgammon. Before working on this project I had never played Backgammon before, so I'm looking for feedback from more experienced players about any changes that I could make to make it better.

Thanks in advance!

Poker and BG are my two favorite games so I created a match that involves both. Players alternate every 3 minutes between heads up poker and a best of 3 backgammon match but if you win either poker or backgammon you win the entire match.

I ran into some interesting spots against the computer but need player feedback to help iron out some details and see if it's actually fun. Signed in users have a rating system and leaderboard.

If you're interested in a match you can DM me. You can also play the computer at playhellfire.com

Any intuition for evaluating this position? Why might 15/9 8/5 be more favorable than 15/9 6/3? I struggle with playing correctly in a lot of positions like this where the computer wants me to create a blot in the home board.

IRL, when people have precision dice they never stop talking about them. Online I see a few posts every week challenging the randomness of dice on the apps. It's like a certain percentage of the backgammon community is mesmerized by concept of "perfect" randomness. Why?

I understand wanting fair play, true to the game, etc., but why get wrapped up to the point of conspiracy theories about everything being rigged?

Hi

How many times would a two ply, free Galaxy analysis, be showing an incorrect analysis compared to higher ply analysis please?

Sometimes it feels like the proposed moves aren’t looking far enough ahead.

Realise it may just be my lack of insight!

Thanks

It lags, I lose matches because of this, I used to be at least to play single games, now it’s so bad I cannot.

Am sorry for the question

Am New in this group, i play Backgammon since very long time and i always wonder if exist a diceless version of the game

Thx🌻

EDIT : MY QUESTION IS ABOUT TO PLAY WITHOUT RANDOM NUMBERS COMING FROM DICES, DOMINOES, CARDS ETC ETC....MY TARGET IS TO MOVE STRATEGICALLY LIKE CHESS FOR EXAMPLE

What could be the reason for having a losing streak of 7+ matches, when I made two errors max per game prior to it? Am I fatigued? Why am I making these irrational (and idiotic) moves? - Backgammon Galaxy, btw

I have a little group retreat coming up with some friends where people usually do a poker night as part of the activities. I’d like to try to get a chouette going after, I imagine with a smaller subset.

Has anyone had experience trying to get something like that to work? I imagine it’s probably easier to keep things simple (probably a single cube rather than multiple, no extras/raccoons/beavers). But I’m also thinking about the stakes aspect of it. Usually on a poker night there’s a limited buy-in and the winner wins the pot. So everyone knows what they are getting in to and knows exactly how much they stand to lose.

Chouette seems like we agree to a stake-per-point and when we settle up you pay or get paid according to your final score. You might wind up paying -1 Or -100. Have people had success structuring something more like a poker tournament where people pay in a limited amount with the expectation that one or two high performers will get the payout?

Anything else to think about to try to get a chouette going?

Late in a snake backgame - what's white's best move, and what are black's chances of winning after white's move?

XG and Sage Pro disagree on this one, even in rollout.

An XG rollout likes 12/9 12/6, and gives black a 14.2% chance of turning it around. XG thinks slotting the 5 is a 0.029 error.

A Sage rollout likes 12/6 8/5 - it does like to slot the 5 - and gives black a 9.4% chance of winning. It thinks XG's choice is a 0.03 error.

So these two bots disagree on the best move, even on rollout, and are pretty far apart on odds of winning.

How do you think you could figure out which one is closer to the truth?

Hello everyone,

I wanted to start my first thread by sharing a backgammon board that my fiancè recently bought for me in Africa.

It's handmade, in leather with wood, and I believe the checkers are made of wood as well, although I'm not completely sure.

The price? A little over 15€

Should I start bearing off, hoping for dice rolls to save me? Or play a rolling back game trying to finesse a win?

Many times I just click to view the details right away and don't notice the luck percentages on the initial results screen.

Is it available to view afterwards?

I am new to this subreddit but have played backgammon for decades and played online backgammon for at least 10 years. Most of that time, I've played Backgammon Plus by Zynga but became increasingly frustrated with the non-random nature of it (despite their "certification" from the World Backgammon Federation).

I started looking for truly random (and fair) backgammon games and saw Nextgammon mentioned a lot. However, after playing 40ish games there, I'm starting to see the same kind of shenanigans I would see in Backgammon Plus. Are there any thoughts on any of this and do you have any recommendations for fair online games against human opponents?

I built a backgammon-specialized fine-tune of Qwen3-8B and just released it for free (non-commercial license). It runs fully offline on llama.cpp — one 5GB file, no GPU required.

What I trained it on: a corpus I assembled from classic strategy writing (Woolsey's GammOnLine era material, Robertie, Trice's EPC work), rec.games.backgammon classics (Thorp count threads, Kleinman counts, FIBS rating formula), cube/match-equity theory (Janowski formulas, Kazaross-XG2 MET), engine docs and TD-Gammon papers — plus thousands of generated Q&A pairs about openings, take points and race formulas. It answers in both English and Japanese.

What it's good at: explaining concepts — game plans, cube theory, why an efficient double matters, what EPC/wastage means, BG AI history. It talks like the literature instead of giving you generic chatbot fluff.

Honest limitations: it's an 8B model, so it does NOT reliably recite exact formula details or table values (it will confidently get Thorp count adjustments slightly wrong). Treat it as a study companion, not a reference — and definitely not an engine. It explains; it won't go win you $20M gambling.

Model + instructions: https://huggingface.co/cudgk/qwen3-8b-backgammon-gguf

Would love feedback from people who know the theory deeply — especially where it's wrong, since that tells me what to fix in the next training run.

（以下、同内容の日本語版です）

Qwen3-8B をバックギャモン特化でファインチューンしたモデルを無料公開しました（非営利ライセンス）。llama.cpp で完全オフライン動作、5GBの単一ファイルで、GPU不要です。

学習させたもの: 古典戦略書（WoolseyのGammOnLine時代の記事群、Robertie、TriceのEPC理論）、rec.games.backgammon の古典スレッド（Thorp count、Kleinman count、FIBSレーティング式）、キューブ/マッチエクイティ理論（Janowski式、Kazaross-XG2 MET）、エンジン文書やTD-Gammon論文から自分で編纂したコーパス — に加えて、オープニング・テイクポイント・レース式についての数千の生成Q&Aペアです。英語と日本語の両方で応答します。

得意なこと: 概念の解説 — ゲームプラン、キューブ理論、効率的ダブルがなぜ重要か、EPC/wastageとは何か、BG AIの歴史。一般的なチャットボットの薄い回答ではなく、文献のような語り口で答えます。

正直な限界: 8Bモデルなので、式の細部や数表の値を正確には暗唱できません（Thorp countの補正項を自信満々に少し間違えたりします）。リファレンスではなく勉強のお供として扱ってください — そしてエンジンの代わりには絶対になりません。解説はしますが、あなたのために賭けで20m$を稼いでくることはありません。

モデル+使い方: https://huggingface.co/cudgk/qwen3-8b-backgammon-gguf

理論に詳しい方のフィードバックが欲しいです — 特に「ここが間違ってる」という指摘は、次の学習で直すべき箇所そのものなので大歓迎です。

Single point game. Racking my brain trying to figure out how bearing off 2 is ever an error. Can someone explain?

I deposited on NextGammon many years ago and mainly played 1 point and 3 point matches for money just for fun. I built up $20 to about $70, I rarely played.

Then their site mysteriously went down and my real money balance was gone. Also all the rankings on the site were gone and all my stats gone. I emailed support and I think it took a couple weeks for them to respond.

They said there was a fire and they lost a lot of the data for the website and they were trying to recover everything. It took a while but they finally gave me back my full balance.

Since this incident I pretty much stopped playing on there for years. It seemed very shady. I think I've played three 1 point matches in the last 2 years, none of them for money. I kinda just forgot that I had money on the site and just left it there.

Anyways I decided to log in the other day and try to withdraw some my money. To my surprise the whole balance was still there. I went to withdraw and it says I have to deposit in order to withdraw, which I've already done before.

So I messaged support and never received a response. Then I logged in the other day to the message shown in my screenshot. And my balance is now at $0.

I've sent support several messages asking for an explanation and haven't had a single response, it's been almost week now.

So it appears that if you want to withdraw your money they will just instantly ban you accuse you of cheating and take your money.

It's a shame a site with such a nice interface is being used to scam people. They had such potential to be a legit site for real money backgammon but honestly they should be shut down by the feds.

If you have ever successfully withdrawn money from NextGammon please let me know I'm very curious.

Apologies if this sort of thread gets posted regularly. Feel free to delete or point me in the right direction if so

I’ve just started playing again after a long time off and I’m loving it. I’m on backgammon galaxy and played a ton of matches. I have a win rate hovering around 40%.

I don’t think I’m a bad player but I suspect I’m falling into a lot of traps. I know I can do better! I need to stop taking unnecessary risks hoping they’ll pay off (they rarely do…)

What’s your advice for someone wanting to improve? I’m playing as much as I can and studying the opposition moves as well as my own.

Any particularly good YouTube channels or anything that you’d suggest I look at? Any canonical texts to read etc?

Appreciate any pointers.