Although luck is an essential element in backgammon, making the game varying, interesting and quite dramatic at times, backgammon is essentially a skill game. The best players never rely on luck and although there is no such thing as always winning in backgammon, they do win most of their games. Learning about backgammon tactics will help you succeed and make your way in online backgammon tournaments.

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One of the most typical backgammon situations is when one ore both players enter a holding game. It is a situation where a player has one ore two anchors or outer field points on the opposing half of the board and the rest of their checkers is on their own half of the board. There are several holding game strategies for various types of holding games, but in it’s simplest form a holding game is only about two things: waiting to hit a shot or waiting to run with a double.

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To a large extent Hypergammon is about luck. You are trying to run your tree men to your home board to bear them off while trying to avoid getting hit by your opponent. It might sound easy but it in reality it can be anything but. There are, however, a few working hypergammon strategies out there and we present one that might just give you the edge at the hypergammon table.

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Backgammon is essentially a game of mathematics, more precisely probabilities. Your success in backgammon therefore relies primarily on how well you can judge the chances of something happening in a given situation - the probability of X. From that we can conclude that in backgammon your decisions are only as good as your judgement of the situation.

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You can play backgammon safe, but that’ll get you nowhere in the long run. To be a winner you need to take risks, something that can’t be emphasized enough. You can, however, take risks either by minimizing them or by being a total fool and not thinking at all. Duplication is the tool you need understand to achieve the first one. There are differing opinions as to how much focus should there be on duplication in backgammon, such as noted in this posting on duplication in Backgammon Galore. We believe that when used correctly you don’t need to focus on duplication as such but that it will become an essential part of your backgammon.

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The Jacoby Rule is named after the late great gamesman Oswald Jacoby. The Jacoby rule states that gammon and backgammon will come into effect if and only if the player has announced a double and it has been accepted by the opponent.

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As we stated in our article Early game strategy article you should be concentrating mainly on building blocking points during the opening stage of the game. Blocking points will make it significantly more difficult for your opponent to achieve the second most important early game strategy goal, which is to escape the back checkers. In this article we’ll focus on what is called priming game, i.e. game where the focus is on making several consecutive blocking points - a prime.

This article deals only with regular priming games. Read also our Six point prime article for in-depth strategy with full primes.

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In article “Backgammon opening moves” we have examined all 15 possible opening moves. In this article we focus on the moves you need to make if when you lost the tossup and you need to react to your opponent’s opening move.

There are 21 possible rolls after each of the 15 opening moves. But don’t worry, we are not going to go in depth to all of those. We could examine all of them in detail just as we did with the opening moves, but we will keep it here as simple as possible.

Note: should you be unfamiliar with backgammon notation, be sure to read our Backgammon notation article before reading on. It’ll help you better understand the content of this article.

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When we talk about backgammon opening moves we are talking about a highly disciplined phase of the game. There are only 15 possible rolls and for many of them there is only one correct way to play it. Later on you can take more freedom with your strategy but not now.

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Doubling cube is used to up the stakes during a backgammon game. This fairly recent addition to backgammon takes this game to the next level by adding a whole new dimension of strategy to the game. Handling the doubling cube well is vital, because using it right can literally double ones earnings.

How the doubling cube is used

Backgammon is often played in matches, where a certain amount of points has to be won to win the match. Each game is worth one point at the beginning and a new game is played if neither player reached the number of points needed to win the match.

So, each backgammon game is worth one point in the beginning. On his turn a player can double this amount, and if the opponent accepts, the game will continue. Now the game is worth two points (double the previous amount) and now the player who accepted the double is the one who may double. This is the standard way how the doubling cube is used.

Detailed instructions

If neither player has yet doubled in a game, then either player may use the doubling cube to double the point value of the game. Player announces a double at the beginning of his turn, before he rolls the dice.

Opponent has to either accept the double or concede the game. If the opponent concedes, the doubling player wins as many points, as the game was worth before the doubling was offered.
Player accepting a double gets control of the doubling cube and is the only one who can now double. Player controlling the doubling cube can double anytime he wants when it is his turn (again before he rolls the dice). If he doubles, the other player must concede or accept, and if he accepts he again gets the control of the cube.

The doubling cube has numbers 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64, but there is no limit to the doubling, so theoretically game can be doubled to 128, 256, etc. However in real life it is rare to see a game doubled beyond 4.

Beavers and other optional rules

Beaver is an often used addition to the doubling cube rules. Beaver means that a player who is deciding wheter to accept a double or not, may immediately redouble and keep control of the cube! So if an opponent makes a poorly calculated double to 2, his opponent may immediately “beaver” to 4 and keep control of the doubling cube (and probably double again to 8 a little later…)

Another optional rule that deals with doubling cube is the Crawford rule. It states that when after a game either one of the players is one point away from winning (i.e. 4-3 in a five point match), then the next game is played without the cube. See full explanation of the Crawford rule for more information.

Winning, gammons, backgammons and the doubling cube

When a game ends, winning player gets as many points as is the value shown on the doubling cube. This number is multiplied by two for gammons and three for backgammons. So if doubling cube is at 4 and player wins a backgammon, he gets 3×4 = 12 points.