Beyond Luck: The Mind, Myths, and Magic of Backgammon with Chris Bray

Chris

[00:00:00]

Arthur: Chris Bra, welcome. It's such a privilege to have you here on the Collective Institute of Ideas.

Chris: Thank you for having me. Yeah.

Arthur: Expert Backgammon player. You've been writing for the independent as their backgammon correspondent for 23 years.

Or author of books. And and you pro you play professionally.

Chris: Yeah, so one point of clarity. So I was the background correspondent for the Independent for 23 years, but seven years ago the paper went digital and they decided as part of that exercise to delete the hold of the games columns. So I had a column but no home. I'd been badgering the times for years to have a back going column.

And coincidentally around that time or just after the independent and digital they sacked their chess correspondent for plagiarism and decided to expand the games that they covered. So they finally a seeded to my request to have a backgammon column. There's also now poker column and a Scrabble column and a few other things.

So [00:01:00] the Times has by far the best coverage for games in the uk and I've been doing that for six years.

Arthur: Amazing. Amazing. And what do you normally write about? Is your brief quite wide ?

Chris: my brief is what I choose it to be. The limitation is 361 words maximum. It will always include a position sometimes it will just be analysis. Sometimes it will be an anecdote, sometimes it will be tournaments. We've got the World Championship coming up in three weeks time in Monte Carlo.

So there'll be a host of positions and stories from there. I have a cast of imaginary characters who play in what's called a ette, which is the multiple version multiple player version of the game. So that again, adds a level of humor. I use Holmes and Watson. So I can do what I like basically within that framework of 361 words.

But it's edited three times. It's edited firstly by my wife to make sure it's. Common sense English. She's a good [00:02:00] backyard player in her own right. It's edited by Ray Kershaw, who's one of my colleagues for many years. And then it's edited by the times to ensure that it fits into the Times brief.

Yeah. So by the time it reaches the public, there shouldn't be any mistake. Yes.

Arthur: Oh. It feels somewhat a privilege to be able to write such a paper but also definitely for them to have you. People are, reading about your nine, you are a popular man in the community. What have been the most popular articles you've written about?

Chris: it's more about books and about articles because several of my books are anthologies of my articles, one article is probably not gonna change the world, but one good book will do. So I started by doing a collaborate sorry, an album of my independent articles, but then I wrote Backgammon for Dummies at the Request of the Dummies Guys in the Yellow and Black Livery.

And that has sold [00:03:00] phenomenally well for many years. Unfortunately, when you write for Dummies, you get a one-off fee. You don't get any royalties, which is a bit of a bummer, but there you go. And then the only thing about Dummies is it has a very prescriptive style than the editor. The editing was very finicky, so I then decided to write the same book with a bit more content in my own prose, and that's called Backgammon to Win and that is my best selling book by a country mile, basically.

Yeah.

Arthur: so while setting, in fact we've got one here.

Chris: There you go.

Arthur: Recommend all viewers, so Backgammon to Win by Chris Bray, for those of you listening in,

Chris: on Amazon, obviously.

Arthur: And it's quite varied, really clearly broken up. You start with a. A short history of backgammon, the basic rules of play, the opening role, responses to the opening role. Advanced doubling people sometimes can dismiss [00:04:00] backgammon as being, oh, it's just luck. What would you say to that?

Chris: So there's a fairly clear answer. Nearly all games have an element of luck. So any card game, any dice game has an element of luck. And that's part of the fun of it because in backgammon. And several other games. A novice can be to world champion in one game, but if he played him for five hours, he'd lose a great deal of money.

In bridge and in poker the fall of the cards influences your outcome. For one evening, basically luck evens out. So over the long term, the better player will win. Backgammon is a combination of skill like mathematics and psychology. No one knows what percentage of all of those things is the stronger.

In a short match, as I said a novice can beat a world champion. But in the longer matches where which the world championship and major tournament is held it's very unlikely [00:05:00] that a novice will beat a really strong player. So it's a nice balance. You get the fun of occasionally beating someone who's incredibly good and you can boast about it from on some end.

But you've gotta be very careful and don't play for a lot of money against people who are very good because you'll end up being very poor.

Arthur: Yeah, the doubling die has got a very aggressive nature, somewhat.

Chris: So doubling so if you go back in history, backgammon is the oldest board game in the world. It's 5,000 years old, approximately but it wasn't called backgammon. Its origins are very obscure. The earliest ones or the earliest vision of a board is from Mesopotamia in 2,500 BC roughly.

But obviously nobody wrote anything down. Nobody know, knew the rules or anything else. The game remained largely unchanged for thousands of years. But importantly in the old days or up until roughly the death of Shakespeare, there were [00:06:00] three dice in play, not two, but when you rolled a double IE, the same number on both dice in the old days, you only got to move.

Two numbers. So if you roll double four, you've got a four and a four in the modern game. If you roll a four and a four, you get four fours, right? So they compensated for removing the third dice by adding in the fact that you get four goes when you roll a double. Without that invention, the game would've died because it was already quite slow and quiet.

And by the mid 1920s and the time of the Great Gatsby, people wanted more excitement and so some bright spark, and no one knows who introduced the doubling cube whereby you could double the stakes during a game. And that did two things. It eliminated some of the luck, and I'll explain why if you want me to do that, but it also meant you could gamble on [00:07:00] it.

So it was originally introduced as a gambling element. And whoever invented it didn't realize what they'd invented because the doubling cube is the most difficult part of bat goon by a country ma. If you go to the Middle East, you'll play back goon without a doubling cube because gambling is not allowed.

But my quick synopsis is if you play back gam, that Dublin cube, it's like going to agarro for dinner and ordering a green salad. It is absolutely pointless. The Dublin cube is incredibly complex. And even now, people struggle to come to terms with how complex it is. It might seem on the outside to be a trivial, easy game, but believe me, it is not.

But that doesn't mean you have to be a really good player to play. Hundreds, thousands, millions of people play back game. Many of whom will never understand the subtleties of the game in the same way that lots of people play chess without ever knowing [00:08:00] or understanding the deep complexities that chess holds.

So it's you can play a game on many different levels. You can play it for fun, you can play it for money, you can play it for love, you can play it for anything. Yeah. It is up to you. But it is an incredibly complex game at its highest level.

Arthur: and yeah, the doubling die. I won't explain it now, but, it really does make the game fun because the game, back gamma in its right nature, you can be, things can really look like you're gonna be winning and then suddenly things can change very quickly. And do, what's the general mistake people make with a, a dubbing die?

Do they tend to double too late? Or too early? 'cause there's that psychological element that you, that you touched on

Chris: Yeah you get a mix of all of those. And this is down to human nature. There were people that will always double early because they're aggressive and they love it. And there were people who will never take a double because they're meek. Yeah. So your personal character affects very much how you play.

[00:09:00] And again, if you go back to before the 1920s or you go to the Middle East, a one game, back game can take a long time. But with the Dublin cube in play, the shortest game of backgammon is two moves.

Arthur: and I occasionally I hear of of there being different variations of backgammon. What are two fond variations that you know of that are that, that are good to try? I.

Chris: backgammon is played in three ways. You either play head to head with another person and you just keep a tally of who wins as you go along. Secondly, there is match play. And particularly since COVID, the vast majority of backgammon in the world is played in match play 'cause it's far more challenging.

So that is the first to a certain number of points. And then the match score changes how you play moves, it changes how you use the doubling cube. The fun way to play it is in a shoe at, if you haven't come across it, is the French for screech owl. And it is a bird that is set upon by all [00:10:00] other birds.

And it originally came from the game of pk. In the shiat version of the game, one player plays against many. So in, in a four person shoe act, one player plays alone and he is called the box. And the other three players are in the team. And the team has a captain, right? The team can consult on their moves.

The box cannot. And also there is a doubling cube in play for each person. The box can double all of everybody, or not as the case may be. And the team members can double whenever they want to, and they don't all have to double together. It leads to huge fluctuations and variations in the value of the games being played.

And if you are in the box, you can lose a huge amount of money. In 20 minutes.

Arthur: Christ. That, that sounds beyond complicated. And going back to Montecarlo, have you been to the World Championship? How does that whole world work? Because more than 99% of people have no [00:11:00] clue on, on how the pay is structured, the prep, do full-time professional backgammon players exist.

Tell us about about that.

Chris: the world. So there are major tournaments all over the world. There's an American circuit, there's a Japanese circuit. All that's slightly dimmed 'cause they've changed some of the laws there. There's a European circuit, so every weekend of the year you come play in a major tournament. Yeah. There is a rating system and there are grandma and masters and so on.

But it doesn't really matter. The World Championship is only the World championship because in 1969 someone ran a tournament and they called it the World Championship, right? There was no re it started off in The Bahamas sorry, Las Vegas. Then it moved to The Bahamas, three years, and it's been resident in Monte Carlo since 1979.

It is not by a long stretch the most highly rated tournament in the world in. And all you have to do to play in the World Championship is to pay your entry fee. Yeah. And [00:12:00] you can play, and obviously you could be throwing away your money if you are a novice, but there are a good 10 to 15% of people who turn up in Monte Carlo every year have got no chance of winning.

They're there for the ludicrous off chance that they might one day win the World Championship. And the kudos that camera's with it.

Arthur: And what do you win if you win it?

Chris: probably about 70,000 Euros roughly. Yeah. But all money tournaments, be it poker background and everything else, there'll be a whole load of hedging along the way.

So by the time you win, you won't win the full amount because you'll have done deals along the way. Yeah.

Arthur: And how does that hedge you work?

Chris: basically you get to a, let's say you're playing a match to 17 points and the score is 16 or. And the winner is gonna win. And obviously the losers are gonna lose, but the loser will want some brow money.

He doesn't want to lose all of it. So they agree as something like a 60 40 split on the total brow pot.

and a lot of hedging is done. There used to be a bookmaker at Monte Carlo, [00:13:00] maybe there, or not the CO, where you could wager on the individual players.

Arthur: Wow,

the fascinating world betting. We should definitely do an episode on that.

Chris: yeah. I don't enjoy going to Monte Carlo.

I stopped going years ago to hold a major tournament in the most expensive, one of the most expensive places in the world, and high season has always seemed somewhat ridiculous to me. So there are better value tournaments, believe me, than World Championship. And this year they've gone back to a format that I really disagree with,

Arthur: yeah. Interesting. Some some politics with backgammon.

Chris: Politics. Yeah. It's very hard. Let me point out to make a living at backgammon by playing. Yeah. Unless you're in the top three or four in the world and you are getting paid appearance, money and you are doing lectures and stuff like that to earn your living play, just solely playing background and is fraught with danger and complexity.

And there may be two or three people in the world who do it, but otherwise, my recommendation was you should always have a day job and [00:14:00] treat backgammon as an exercise. And that's what I did for years. And then I retired obviously from my day job and then I am now a backgammon professional, but I own my money through teaching and writing and not through playing.

Yeah,

Arthur: yeah. Teaching now available through the collective community. The which the link will be below really excited. I've never had a lesson before, but looking forward to booking one. And because, chess is obviously an enormous popular sport.

what's the character involved in this, in the chess world? Magnus, is it Magnus?

Chris: Mag Magnus Carson. Yeah. I played serious level chess. I played serious level bridge as well. But in chess barring a complete calamity of the best player will always win, right? Because the luck element in chess is tiny, right? It depends on the draw for the colors in the first. And it is a pure mind game.

Yeah.

and it's also chess and background are games of total information, meaning you can see everything on the board in front of you. You can see the dice. If you play poker or you play [00:15:00] bridge, those are games of hidden information which require a different type of mindset because you are engaged in deductive thinking.

So the skills needed to play the different games are. Similar, but varies. Yeah. So I gave, I, I played chess, I played county level chess, but I was never gonna be any better than I was because I just don't have the right type of mind and I don't have the inclination to do hours and hours of study, which you are required to do at chess.

So I, I discovered backgammon and that played to all of my strengths, and that's where I ended up.

Arthur: how would you segment, the skills of backgammon? You talked a bit about the mass and the psychology.

Chris: so bank government is largely a game of two, two things and one additional. So largely it's a game of pattern recognition. So if you see a position in front of you, you will have in your mind positions that you have studied [00:16:00] and games that you have played, and you can recall those positions.

Adjust for the position in front of you and then make a decision. What that means is you don't get any child pros at backgammon because you need a library of positions in your brain before you're able to make effective decisions. Secondly, it's a game of arithmetic. There's a huge amount of counting in backgammon and if you're not very good at mental arithmetic it's fine most of the time and you can still enjoy the game.

But if you want to be a. World class player, you have to be pretty good at mental arithmetic. And third, yeah, thirdly, there's an element of psychology because you are talking about a game where effectively betting is part of it. Not directly when you're playing a match, but certainly if you're playing for money.

There's a lot of psychology and background because people have a fear of losing

and they also have a fear of winning. Yeah,

Arthur: can you think of really good players who on the [00:17:00] psychology side. Have demonstrated unusually unusual approaches or clever things that they've done.

Chris: it's not an unusual approach. It's the ability to plant pressure. Back yam is a game of risk and reward, and every move and every decision has some risk and some reward, and you can. Certainly with the doubling cube, particularly when the doubling cube gets high, you can bluff. Yeah. There's a guy called Nack Ballard in the United States who famously said, in matches I will often redouble my opponent, which means the cube goes from two to four on the, in the hope that he will pass because once a cube gets to four then basically you are feeling the pressure.

Immediately, and if you read your opponent correctly, people like nack are very good at reading their opponents and knowing whether they will take or drop, irrespective of whether it is technically take or drop. Yeah,

Arthur: in [00:18:00] ancient Persia Bagga was known as n I'm sure the pronunciations

 it was believed to represent life's unpredictable ability. And the d symbolizes fate. And the checkers represent the struggle to move through life, despite chance. You can't help but acknowledge that parts of life do feel similar to backgammon. Do you feel that's true?

Chris: There are many people who've invented many different interpretations about gamma. There's an astro astrological explanation for backgammon comparing the points as day and night and all sorts of things. It, I'll listen to it, but I'm not gonna be influenced by it. It's if you're trying to find an excuse for something, it used to be called od Deum script, a tabo with the Romans. And Niro was a very strong backgammon player. Or it was called tables for short. And he would pay play for the equivalent of $10,000 a game in [00:19:00] ancient Rome. But of course, no one actually wrote down what happened if the opponent won, because I suspect they won't have lived very long.

Arthur: C can you think of have you got any particularly unusual memories playing backgammon? Maybe it's this character you played or someone's thrown a, a backgammon weekend that's involved. Some quite nuanced, amusing things.

Chris: Oh, we used to have great fun. So back in the old days when Victor Stocks ran Lowes, so Victor ran the Playboy Club for many years. And Victor was a very average player, but he showed me a check one night for, I think it was something like $200,000. And that was the tax on his winnings from the preceding year that he was just sending off to the IRSS in the us.

And people played for ludicrous amounts of money. There are only three instances of people having been killed while playing that gun in arguments. There were two at Bridge by the way. And we used to, so my, when I was young, 30, 40 years [00:20:00] ago, we used to play in ahu at, we played in the pub in the Gloucester Road.

We played there till 11 o'clock. We were then jumping our cars and one of the guys had a half share in a place called the Mediterranean Kebab House in the old court road. And we would play there till five in the morning and we would then all go home and try to get to work for eight o'clock the next morning.

But I was playing there one night against an old friend in an incredibly complex position where both players held lots of points in their opponents, half of the board, and we'd all had a lot to drink. And Mike stopped me and he said, look, Chris, I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to stop you, but which way round are we playing? Yeah, so there are a few people like that. There's a nice story about James Goldsmith. So if you have a great deal of money, you can lose a great deal of money and not worry about it. And I had a friend who was playing Goldsmith and he was winning easily. And then there was a freak set of dice whereby the game [00:21:00] became an absolutely 50 50.

Proposition with Goldsmith owning the Cube on 200 and it's 128, I think, and they're playing for $500 a point. And my friend said, look, this is ridiculous. We're already playing for too much money. Why don't we just call it off? Yeah. Because one of us is going to use a great deal of money. And Goldsmith thought about it for a minute and he said, look, I'll tell you what we're gonna do.

Instead of calling off, I'm gonna red redo to 256. And he red Redoubled 2 56. We went on to win the game and my friend spent the rest of the year paying off the loss on that one game. Yeah.

So be aware of people with an immense amount of money. The racehorse guy whose name I can't remember, who used to get on with Alex Ferguson, he would play for immense amounts of money.

Yeah.

Arthur: Yeah.

Chris: and fam most famously, I think Paul Mcri was the best background player in the world for many years. He was background world [00:22:00] champion in 1978. He was a friend for many years. And fortunately he died about seven years ago. But. And he would give lessons. He would fly all over the world to give lessons and he would, he flew every other weekend from Vegas to Texas to give lessons to two Texas oil billionaires and they would pay him, say, 40, $50,000 for the lesson because that was a meaningful amount of money.

And then after the lesson, they would play each other and then they had to agree what they were playing for, and they said look, it's gotta be meaningful because otherwise you can take any doubt or drop any door. Let's play for a million a point. And that's what they did. They played for a million, million dollars a game.

Yeah,

Arthur: Oh wow.

Chris: that's right. Just beware of people with a great deal. Other money behind them. That's true in all walks of life, not just background.

Arthur: The quirk the quirks of

Chris: Yeah. The quirks of high. So there's one rule for high stakes gambling, right? And that is this, you care, [00:23:00] not a thing about the money. You care only about winning or losing. And if you can do that, then you can be a high stakes player. And if you can't do that, then you can't be a high stakes player. Yeah. In backgammon, my rule is if you are playing for $10 a point, you've gotta be able to budget for losing a hundred points.

Yeah. So if you then can't write a check, old fashioned terminology, we'll do a bank transfer for a thousand dollars and sleep comfortably. You are already playing for too much money.

Arthur: Yeah, it's yeah. Yeah. I'm sure a lot of people, certainly myself, can remember the moments where we just made poor decisions got carried away. Which makes me think about the professionals, you've, you talked a bit about character and how that influences outcomes and your ability to,

Chris: Yeah.

Arthur: play well.

What are the, some of the character traits that that you can think about? For example, when you know, when you're doing badly, it can become very stressful. You can, [00:24:00] people can get overwhelmed. Cutting out the emotions and being pragmatic is obviously very helpful.

What are the things that you think about when I talk about that.

Chris: Yeah, it's not only helpful, it's essential if you can't divorce yourself from the diet. Then you have absolutely no chance of winning. If you've been watching Wimbledon for the past week, you'll have noticed Irina Lanka has got her emotions in check. So when she played in the French open and lost to golf, she did not have her emotions in check and that cost of the match.

In backgammon, if you cannot keep your emotions in check, you will lose. You have to be able to exercise the same set of skills, treat each position. As if it was a new position. And go from there. There are two in terms of a rating system. There are two super grand in the world. Yeah. One is a guy called Dirk Seaman in Germany and the other one is Moshi.

Moshi. So use it. I can never pronounce his surname. He's just known as Moshi. And those [00:25:00]two play consistently at a level better than anybody else in the world. Have you come across performance rating.

Arthur: No.

Chris: Alright chess computers have been around a long time. People have been using them for years.

They weren't very good. Now, obviously with Deep Mind and Alpha Chess and all that, they can be anybody in the world. Backyard computers struggled because they were using tree search technologies and that didn't work because there were too many possibilities because of the d. And then in 1991, neural N Technology came along.

So all you do is you give the computer the rules of the game and tell it to teach itself. It plays itself half a million times and it works out the strategy. And overnight backgammon theory changed. So things that have been viewed as gospel for years were suddenly found to be completely untrue. And the game of back Goman was reinvented in 1994.

Because of the [00:26:00] advent of computers. And the guy who did the first one didn't do it commercially. He just thought Ham was a great vehicle for develop, developing neural net theories. Yeah. Yeah. And then commercial versions appeared with strange names. So we had jellyfish we had Nu we had snowy and now we have xg.

Extreme Gammon, which has been the defacto standards since 2009, has recently being bought by the guy who owns Uber, and it's about to have a huge investment poured into it to make it stronger and better and get all the user interfaces sorted out.

Arthur: who involved in Uber is doing that.

Chris: Travis, but I can't remember his

Arthur: Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: Okay.

Arthur: Because it feels backgammon, chess gets a lot of attention. And, Magnus, he is a bold figure. Known for rocking up late to games. He's entertaining.

Is he the best in the world? I know he is been beaten. I dunno where he's ranked, but backgammon seems [00:27:00] to be both something that is incredibly popular and at the moment, but doesn't. Certainly doesn't have the apps like, chess.com for example. The usability is incredible. I, is there something you recommend for people

Chris: Yeah,

Arthur: ham?

Chris: Yeah, so the defacto standard is extreme gamon. Yeah. That is an a program which runs on PCs. I run it on a virtual machine on a Mac, which is easy to do. The app equivalent is XG mobile bar. But that used to be on both the app. Apple platform and the Google platform at the moment, it's not on the Google platform, but it will return in due course.

And there's also backgammon, nj both of those are okay. XG mobile is stronger, so it's best if you have a, an Apple device. Yeah.

But to go back to performance ratings so XG will give you a performance rating. It will tell you how good you are. Yeah, [00:28:00] which nobody ever knew before computers came along.

You have two performance ratings, one for your doubling cube handling and one for your checker player handling, and you combine the two to get your overall rating. There isn't a single player in the world who has a better cube handling rating than a chapter player rating because cube handling is that much more difficult.

Xg, the program plays with a performance rating of zero. So zero is perfect and anything above that is imperfect. The super grand master is 2.75. If you are a really good expert player, you will play just below four. Yeah, an intermediate will play round about eight to 10, and the beginning will play anything from 17 to 20.

Just to give you some idea. Yeah. Most of the people who win the World Championship are gonna be capable of playing around three and a half to four. But what was I gonna say? Three and a half to four, sorry, lost my thread for a moment. In the old [00:29:00] days, if you, nobody recorded the back match, by the way, till 1977.

Right? Nobody ever wrote down a match. They wrote down positions. They never recorded a match, which was ridiculous. Sorry. Seven three, not seven seven. And then there was a UK versus a US match. Everyone recorded the moves. Nowadays, everybody records their moves. Everybody, if you play on an online site, you can download your games and then you can analyze them.

So then you, I never play after I played a match online. I never play another one till I've on analyzed the previous one. Yeah.

so if you put in world championship matches from the seventies and before. You'll get people with a PR around about eight, eight and a half, right? Because no one actually knew they were making so many mistakes.

Now, lets say you'll get a raft of players who can play between three and four, and those are the people who will be able to contest world championships and major tournaments.

Arthur: Fascinating how AI impacts our [00:30:00] ability to understand what we know, what we don't know, and how, as you say, it is changed again. Going back to the controlling your emotions, are there some tricks you give people or, exercises you give people to to be, to do that.

Chris: It is largely down to your own personalities. I used to get annoyed when I was first starting playing the game where you rail against the dice and stuff like that because they've been unfair to you and you've had a horrendous night. And lost a great deal of money. It's all about it's what who's the guy who coached the England World Cup rugby winning team?

It'll come to me in a moment. Clive Woodward, right? So Clyde Woodward has a thing called teacup, and that's called thinking correctly under pressure. That mechanism can be used in any game, alright? And that is what he coached. The England World Cup team in 1973 to use, and that's why they won the World Cup.

Yeah, that set of approaches [00:31:00] can be used by anybody. And I try to teach people the fundamentals of that in bat gamut. Stand rinka, the tennis player, became a much better player once he got a tattoo on his arm, which basically said, fail. Fail again. Fail again. Get better. And that's all it says.

That's not exactly what it says, but you get the idea. It doesn't matter if you fail, if provided you learn from when you fail. Yeah. Yeah.

and that enabled him to win a couple of slam tournaments. Yeah. So everybody has a different mechanism. And there are some people who cannot control their emotions and they're great to play against.

'cause you win a huge amount of money.

Arthur: Really interesting, the psychology around failure. A never ending topic.

Chris: You've got PE people can do they choke. Yeah. Navona in the Wimbledon final, there's a couple of others classic examples. The guy who lost the the open golf championship when he stuffed his ball in the water and took an eight at [00:32:00] Carti on his final hole, people who collapse under pressure.

And that happens at, I've seen world Championships where particularly people have collapsed under pressure. And you can, I do quite a lot of commentary and you can tell when people are beginning to make mistakes.

Arthur: And when, let's say you are playing Chris, and you are, there's an audience and for about 50 reasons, you're really feeling the pressure. You really want this game and you make a mistake. What are you telling yourself to keep calm and be focused?

Chris: I dunno, as you get older you get much more sanguine. And if I win or lose a major tournament, it's not gonna change my life. I'm much more interested in probably my grandchildren now than I'm in winning a huge major tournament. But for some people it's. It's not the same, and they end up succumbing to the pressure, but I always just say it's the dice, basically.

They, it will be what it will be. All you have to do is make the best moves based on the dice and the [00:33:00] position in front of you, and that's all you can do. You can't control anything else. You can exert pressure on your opponent by, let's say. You are thinking of doubling and you know that the other guy should pass.

It's a trivial example, but I may well wait a minute and a half before I double to give the other guy the impression that it's close, which it isn't. So you can use psychology like that.

Arthur: Yeah, there's a lot to be said around. Knowing what you can control and what you can't control. And in one of Steven Bart's interviews, he interviews a, an entrepreneur. And the entrepreneur states that they often view businesses as, games of chess.

It's not life. It's just something you are, you choose to, be involved with. If it doesn't work out, then onto the next one, basically. And. There clearly is something in that mentality to be able to just see and acknowledge that actually,

having a go regard, knowing that, things don't work out

Chris: if you relate to that, I, when [00:34:00] I used to work for IBMI, I did a huge amount of work with startups and entrepreneurs and stuff, and if you take 20 startups that one might succeed. 10 or tank five might break even, four might be a bit dodgy, and as you said, you just move on to the next one.

And if you plan back government tournaments and you play 10, 10 a year. Five of them are gonna go south very quickly, but you'll hope to cash into maybe three of the others sufficiently that you know you are happy with the outcome. That you cannot win every game you play. I had a colleague in my club at homies, a world class bridge player, and he came across to Bat Gun and played, and he was quite good, but he could never cope with losing at all.

So after two weeks he was gone. Yeah. I had a Formula One driver as a student, and he his only reason for taking lessons was to get back some money that he lost from one of the other Formula One drivers. And we probably [00:35:00] achieved that as a mental giant. He wasn't there. Yeah. I just taught him.

And again, when you're teaching people, you have to recognize how far you can take any particular individual. Because if they haven't got all their characteristics required, you can get 'em to a certain point, but you can't take them any further.

Arthur: That's really interesting because I think, as a humans we're not, and this will, this is likely to change with ai, but. We're still not that good at, mapping out intelligence skills. And it's certainly obvious, at least to me, that some people are able to memorize so many different scenarios in truly an astonishing way.

One and two, going, talking about the mental arithmetic, just being able to map out and but as you say, recognizing how different people's brains work.

Chris: Yeah. I was born with a skill to do mental arithmetic very quickly. And I have no, I didn't learn it. I didn't, I did practice it, but I was [00:36:00] basically born with that ability. And if you're not born with that ability, I can teach you to count about government. My fundamental belief is that anybody can count, right?

They may not want to count, but they can count, right? But you are also under the limitation of a clock in major tournaments, and you may not have time to do that. If you're online, you get given the counts, right? But in live play, you need to be able to perform mental arithmetic very quickly. And if you can't do that, I can only take you to a certain level.

Arthur: Interesting. Would can I put you on the spot? Can I give you some numbers to, to pull out?

Chris: no. You can, but you can gimme a try. But my skill, so most people's skills are related to what they do, right? So if you give a chess player or a backgammon player and you give them. A minute to look at a board, they can walk to another board and reproduce it. If you put a set of chess pieces on a chess board, but not in a normal position, and ask them to replicate that on another board, they have got no chance of doing it.

Arthur: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I know [00:37:00] when I play backgammon is I don't think about what the opponent's doing enough. Do you spend much time? That, that seems to be a very critical, useful way to learn about the game.

Chris: So in any position, you should have a game plan and you should understand your opponent's game plan. You want to execute your opponent's game plan, sorry, your game plan and disrupt your opponent's game plan. The dice don't always let you do that, but you should at least, you should always have an idea of what you're trying to achieve before you roll the dice

and they may not play ball.

Arthur: Yeah I love the I love that you allude to dice having their own world.

Chris: There is a dice, God, it's called Pips, Alot, P-I-P-C-E-L-O-T, right?

Arthur: And you met your wife through backgammon, is that correct?

Chris: no, I met my wife at university but she taught me to play background.

Alright, y years ago she taught me to play and I thought it was a stupid game. And then one night I got involved, I was system testing software and it had nothing to do, and some guy challenged me to back down. [00:38:00] I said, oh, I can play.

No problem. Let's play. And he said let's play for money. And I lost 10 quid and I, I wasn't having it. So that at that point I went and bought two books. Within two weeks I got all my money back and a lot more, you have to to be good about gammon, you have to study, you have to read, you have to listen to online matches with good commentary.

Dirk Seaman, who I mentioned earlier, has written a book called To Hit Or Not To Hit, which my opinion is the best book on back gamon I've ever read. And that only came out last year. There were two, Paul McGreal wrote the book called Background in 1976. For many years, that was the Bible, right?

Dirk three years ago wrote the theory of backgammon, which is, it is a very heavy going, virtually mathematical treaties on backgammon. But again, if you're gonna be good, you need to have read it.

Arthur: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Chris: people come to back Gowan think it's easy and you can make some money on that. That's not true.

Like everything else in life. You [00:39:00] get out what you put in, so you have to put effort in. I probably spend, I don't know, a minimum of 15 hours a week playing. I will do study for still for three or four hours a week. I give lessons for seven hours a week, so I'm constantly involved.

And as you get older, of course it gets more difficult to remember everything, which is a bit of a bummer. But again, you can't do anything about that.

Arthur: Chris, it's been such a. A privilege to hear from you about all corners of backgammon. Whether it be learning about the championships to fantastic stories, what makes a good player. We're now gonna jump into the quickfire questions. Three things that give you joy.

Chris: So primarily my family, I've just got acquired two, two new granddaughters winning because that's what I like to do. And friends, the background community is fantastic. So I've got friends all over the world from background.

Arthur: A mantra you want to [00:40:00] embrace

Chris: Just to play honestly, I think and enjoy life. Enjoy back, go and enjoy life. If you don't get enjoyment outta what you're doing, you're not going anywhere and you'll live a short life.

Arthur: One unusual thing that gives you pleasure.

Chris: Croquet. There you go.

that up. Great fun.

Arthur: talk, talking of sports that can become competitive.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Croquet is a vicious game, believe me. My, my back doesn't want me to play golf anymore, so I'm switching allegiances into croquet, but it's a fantastic game.

Arthur: A, a favorite book film or artist that isn't obvious.

Chris: Oh, that's a shame. My favorite book for years was Lord of the Rings. Yeah. Just because I came from that era and Jimi Hendrix was always my favorite artist. But that's going back in the sands of time again. Yeah,

I saw his last, but one performance.

Arthur: Which was where

Chris: All of white. 1970.

Arthur: Wow. Wow.

Advice that you have been given that [00:41:00] you are very grateful for.

Chris: tricky. I've been given lots of advice in my life. But yeah, probably the easiest thing to say is just don't let things get you down because there are times in your life when you have great lows and I had a mentor at work once and he would always look on the bright side of life. To be able to do that consistently is fantastic.

Yeah.

Arthur: takes focus that

Chris: I know I'm probably not gonna win the World Championship at this point, mainly 'cause I don't play in the tournament. I'm good enough to win it, but I'd rather go to my tournament in the Cowells. I'll play in the British Open this year. That'd be fun.

Arthur: Where would that be?

Chris: Strangely it's held in the exotic location of Leamington Spa.

Arthur: Okay. That's where you'll be.

Chris: I'll be there at the end of August. Yes. But I have a favorite tournament which is in Bo, which is next to view, France on the south, French South Coast. Just a fabulous place to visit. In fact, they canceled the tournament this year and we went [00:42:00] anyway 'cause we just liked the place so much

Arthur: And we'll be finishing up the recording now, but is there anything you wanted to say or.

Chris: No, I mean if to anyone listening, I mean if you want to a quick fire away to learn back again and then just buy one of the books, be it mine or anybody else's, because learning by experience it takes too long. So putting two or three hours spade work by reading a book, find someone to teach you who with whom you have empathy.

Yeah. And you can go quite a long way. And to me, it's the best game in the world. You, it gives me endless hours of enjoyment, both from a study point of view, but from playing point of view. You get new positions every day that you don't understand and you learn like many things you learn every time you play.

Arthur: Amazing. . Thank you so much for today.