Newsletter for 9 March 2004

March On...

On Tuesday, 9 March 2004, the Backgammon Club of San Diego met, and with nothing better to do, we ran a tournament.

Tournament News

Nine people entered a 16-player bracket on Tuesday night. We had the following tournament results:

First place: Jason Lee
Second place: Sho Sengoku
Third place: Greg Kopp

Jason's win was his third in the last four weeks, interrupted by a 2nd place finish last week.

Greg won three out of four matches to finish in third place, which puts him on the master points leader board.

The club welcomed Jim Woodson, who played for the first time. We definitely hope Jim will return in the future to be a regular.

Tonight's tournament featured an something unusual. By the time the 2nd round entry/reentry deadline (8:40 p.m.) had passed, nobody had entered for the 4th semifinal qualifier spot. As a result, the 4th spot was auctioned off to the highest bidder. Jason outbid Henry Chaboki for the spot for $40, and parlayed it into a first place finish... good thing for Jason, since by the time he won that auction, he had invested $90 in the tournament!

Current Master Points Standings

By winning on Tuesday night, Jason has opened up a commanding lead in the Master Point race -- 14 points ahead of Bruce. Sho's 2nd place finish moved him into 4th place overall.

 1. Jason Lee        39
 2. Bruce Haight     25
 3. Adrian Costa     23
 4. Sho Sengoku      12
 5. Tom Fahland      11
 6. Cyrus Mobedshahi 10
 7. Marcia Karen      9
 8. Osman Guner       7
 9. Greg Kopp         2
10. Fred Kamgar       1
11. Sam Mehri         1

The point leader at the end of the year will be named the BCSD Player of the Year, and the top 16 in the Master Point standings will be invited to the 2004 BCSD Tournament of Champions, to be held in early 2005.

Problem of the Week

Let's continue with our theme of cubes where the taking side is on the roof against a five point board. Can you take this cube?

+-13-14-15-16-17-18-+---+-19-20-21-22-23-24-+

|1 |

| |

+-12-11-10--9--8--7-+---+--6--5--4--3--2--1-+

Pip counts: White 72, Black 98

Last Week's Problem of the Week

+-13-14-15-16-17-18-+---+-19-20-21-22-23-24-+

+-12-11-10--9--8--7-+---+--6--5--4--3--2--1-+

Pip counts: White 99, Black 76

This can't be easy. Any six is a market loser for Black -- and by a huge amount. So there really can't be much question that this is a double.

But what about the take? Can you really take with two on the roof against a five point board? Yes! Black's sixes are duplicated -- if Black rolls a 6, he'll need to run... the danger of crunching is serious. So unless Black rolls 6-6, 6-3, 6-2, or 6-1, White is going to get a shot. And if White hits, it's big... White can probably cash. And what if no six pops out for Black? There's going to be some crunching going on.

If you add it up, it really does look like White can take. A GNU rollout shows that the double decision is close -- but that this is a monster take! Wow!

Cube decision

Rollout cubeless equity +0.439

Cubeful equities:

1. Double, take +0.670

2. Double, pass +1.000 +0.330

3. No double +0.594 -0.075

Proper cube action: Redouble, take

Rollout details

Win W g W bg Lose L g L bg Cubeless Cubeful

Player Black owns 4-cube 0.658 0.162 0.001 - 0.342 0.040 0.000 +0.439 +0.594

Standard error 0.001 0.000 0.000 - 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.002 0.003

Player White owns 8-cube 0.661 0.159 0.001 - 0.339 0.039 0.000 +0.888 +0.670

Standard error 0.001 0.000 0.000 - 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.003 0.004

Truncated cubeful rollout (depth 11) with var.redn.

7776 games, Mersenne Twister dice gen. with seed 963630208 and quasi-random dice

Play: 0-ply cubeful [expert]

Cube: 2-ply cubeful 100% speed [world class]

See you next week! Keep tossing those cubes,
J. Lee

Output generated by GNU Backgammon 0.14-devel (HTML Export version 1.123)