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The first backgammon page on the web. Online since 1994. (History)
Please choose the mirror site nearest to
you: Home site
(UK) | Japan
Welcome to the WWW Backgammon Page! In here I've tried to
include pointers to all of the most popular backgammon resources on the
Internet Backgammon, as well as lots of new material. Any comments or suggestions for
improvement to sret1@cam.ac.uk,
please.
Major collections at this site:
What's new at this site?
This page has the following sections:
Beginners might like to look first at the rules of backgammon (maintained by Tom
Keith). There are also Italian and German translations of
these rules available.
The newsgroup for backgammon lovers is rec.games.backgammon. Tom Keith has an archive of some of the best
postings over the years.
Tom Keith has lots of other good stuff at his Backgammon Galore! site, including a backgammon dictionary, with
definitions of lots of common terms and jargon. CyberArts and Funcom both have
some notes about strategy.
I have a page of backgammon suppliers.
I have a page of other games which can be
played on a backgammon board.
The most important thing every internet backgammon player should know is how
to play other people over the internet. There are now lots of backgammon servers
which enable you to do this. I can't review them all here, but I have a list of them on another page. (A lot of them have other
games too).
The original backgammon server was FIBS -- the First Internet Backgammon
Server, developed by Andreas Schneider. It's free, and there are players of all
standards there, from beginners to experts (including computers). Read the FIBS web page for more information, including a
guide for new players. The FIBS address is telnet fibs.com 4321. Read about graphical interfaces for FIBS if you don't
like playing with O's & X's.
(Don't mail me if you have problems with FIBS; sorry, but I won't answer. I
am not the maintainer of FIBS, and I don't know how to use your computer. If you
still can't get in after reading the guide, contact your sysadmin or service
provider).
European users might have trouble connecting to FIBS because there's too much
lag across the Atlantic. You can try connecting via the Norwegian Connection,
set up by Eirik Pedersen, which routes you to FIBS via Norway. This is usually
much faster. To use this service, telnet
ra.pvv.ntnu.no 4321 instead of telnetting directly to FIBS.
There are also two FIBS-compatible servers (so any FIBS client should be able
to use them): NOBS in the US (telnet
nobs.mi.org 4321), and melBG in Australia (telnet melbg.org 4321). See Lou Poppler's Web page and the Melbourne Backgammon
Club page for more information.
Kit and Sally Woolsey have kindly volunteered to pay the running costs of
FIBS out of their own pockets. It costs about US$500 per month. If you have
enjoyed FIBS and want to help them with the cost, contact Kit at kwoolsey@netcom.com.
Many commercial servers have started up recently. The largest is CyberArts's Games Grid. Their server is
only available to Windows 95 & NT users. Their client software is much
prettier than the FIBS clients, and they offer daily tournaments, expert
lessons, etc. They charge US$10 per month, or US$80 per year. Guests can play
for free but are unrated.
Netgammon is another commercial
server for Windows users. It costs US$50 per year.
You can also play by e-mail, using Richard Rognlie's Play-By-eMail server
which knows about lots of games including backgammon.
There are also computer programs called HC-Gammon, Motif Backgammon and Ian's Backgammon
which you can play against on the Web.
These are only the main servers dedicated to backgammon. There are lots of other servers which have backgammon as one of
many games.
There are lots of tournaments on the various
backgammon servers. Keep an eye on the newsgroup and on the various servers' home pages.
Kevin Bastian has an explanation of the FIBS rating formula.
Also François
Hochedé and James
Eibisch have both written rating calculators (in Javascript) so you can see
how many points you're risking before you start a match.
  Computer Programs
There are two leading
programs which are about equal to the best human players. They are Jellyfish and Snowie. Snowie comes in two versions, at US$100
& US$380. Jellyfish has three versions, at US$35, US$100 and US$220, and
also a freeware version called Jellyfish Light (full
playing strength). For serious students of the game, these are the best tools
available today. Don't ask me which of the two plays better or has better
features though - I'm not qualified to judge!
These two programs are based on neural network technology: they have learnt
just by playing against themselves. The early research on neural network
technology in backgammon was conducted by Gerry Tesauro at IBM, and he wrote the
first neural network backgammon program, TD-Gammon. He wrote about his work in
the academic papers Machine Learning, 8, 257-77 (1992) and
Comm. of the ACM,
38, 58-68 (1995) (available online). I also have some discussion about the program from IBM.
Jay Scott has written more about
these programs (and about HC-Gammon and Motif Backgammon which I mentioned
above and which use slightly different learning methods).
The best of the non-neural net programs is Expert Backgammon by Tom Weaver,
for the PC or Mac. You can get e-mail Tom at tomweave@netcom.com.
Shareware and freeware backgammon programs are often weak. The best are
perhaps bg15 and MVP Backgammon for Windows (3
and 95/98), Pro Backgammon
for Windows 95/98 and NT, and David's
backgammon game for Windows and Mac. Other programs with Web pages are Pocket Backgammon
2.2 for the Apple Newton, and various programs for the Psion. I don't know how good these programs
are.
There are various other programs which, while not actually playing
backgammon, are of interest to backgammon players. Gareth McCaughan has written
a program called race3 to
work out the right cube action or move in bear-off positions, using an exact
calculation. For long bearoffs, or positions with lots of pieces, the
calculation rapidly become intractable, so Eric Groleau has written another
program, bgout, that
performs cubeless rollouts of bear-off positions to give approximate winning
percentages. Alternatively, Hugh Sconyers has published various databases allowing you to look up exact winning
probabilities in bearoffs and backgames. There are two databases for purchase on
CD-ROM, plus two free databases for 4-checker bearoffs and 1-checker races.
I have written a
program, based on an idea by Jörg Richter, to turn backgammon positions into
pretty boards. Jörg has now written a LaTeX
style file for displaying backgammon boards without the need to draw them in
Postscript first.
  Books and Magazines
There are many bad backgammon books and some good ones too. I have reviews of
over 20 books on a separate page.
There are also various backgammon magazines and newsletters available. Two of
the best are the Flint Area
BackgammoNews and Chicago Point, which both contain
a mixture of news and articles. The Bibafax (newsletter of the
British Isles Backgammon Association) is also good, and has its own web page, as
does Norpunkt
(the newsletter of the Norwegian Backgammon
Federation, in Norwegian).
I also have a page of backgammon suppliers,
where you can buy books and magazines.
I have some information and links about doubling
strategy in matches.
Gamer Café have designed a Chouette
Calculator to help keep track of all those cubes and scores (as well as
partners, extras etc.).
Greg Ash has an Excel 7
spreadsheet to calculate rating changes for a tournament of 16 people.
One very useful way of learning is to work through annotated matches from
experts. Some time ago, Kit Woolsey and Jeremy Bagai played a match, recorded
it, and annotated it with the help of the computer program TD-Gammon. There is
an HTML version of this
match, typeset by Tom Keith, a Postscript version by
Jörg Richter, and the original plain
text version.
Later Casey Forrest and David Eggert played another match which was annotated
by Kit Woolsey and the computer programs Jellyfish and TD-Gammon. Again, there
is a Postscript
version and a plain
text version. William Tallmadge also has a version with evaluations from a
newer version of Jellyfish.
The Backgammon by the Bay club
in San Francisco also have lots of excellent annotated matches from
their club.
Various people have matches in their filespaces, some annotated or partially
annotated, some without annotations. My collection
contains HTML and plain text versions of thousands (2514 to be precise!) of
matches between top FIBS players observed by Mark Damish's program Big_Brother,
as well as 300 matches between the computer programs mloner and Jellyfish. Pål Fladsrud has some more
matches in his filespace, and I have some FIBS matches in my ftp
filespace.
Morten Wang has a collection of positions discussed on the newsgroup.
Kit Woolsey and Hal Heinrich have produced a series of annotated matches for
the PC called Matchqiz. You can get a demo match for
free.
Carol Joy Cole sells annotated matches.
I have a list of backgammon clubs round the
world. (This also contains pointers to national backgammon pages and
backgammon clubs' pages). I have information from over 30 different countries.
Bill Davis has contributed a page of advice about how to start up and run your own backgammon club, and also a page with the
U.S. tournament rules.
Carol Joy Cole and Chicago Point have a diary of forthcoming
tournaments.
I have a list of past winners of major backgammon
tournaments.
For tournaments on FIBS, Games Grid and Netgammon, see section 2 above.
THANKS!
This page could not have happened without the contribution of
dozens of people, both those who have written resources that I point to, and
those who have alerted me to them. I used to try and list them, but there got to
be too many for me to keep up with. So instead, I'd just like to thank them all.
© Stephen
Turner
University of Cambridge Statistical Laboratory
E-mail: sret1@cam.ac.uk
(FIBS name:
Turner)
Page last modified: 10-Oct-01
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