Newsletter for 16 March 2004

St. Patrick's Day Edition

On Tuesday, 16 March 2004, the Backgammon Club of San Diego met, and with nothing better to do, we ran a tournament.

Tournament News

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

First place: Eric Sedehi
Second place: Fred Kamgar
Third place: Adrian Costa & Maira Costa (split)

Eric Sedehi won his first tournament of the year, and after a long absence, Fred Kamgar returned to finish in second place.

Next week, we will make a big push to hold some blitzes -- last week several people got shut out of reentering. Four players constitute a blitz -- $10 entry, single elimination, winner takes all, and we'll award one master point to the winner.

Current Master Points Standings

By winning on Tuesday night, Eric enters the Master Point race in 8th place, while the top 7 positions remain unchanged. Maira Costa played for the first time this year, and split for third place to also enter the leader board.

 1. Jason Lee        39
 2. Bruce Haight     25
 3. Adrian Costa     24
 4. Sho Sengoku      12
 5. Tom Fahland      11
 6. Cyrus Mobedshahi 10
 7. Marcia Karen      9
 8. Eric Sedehi       8
 9. Osman Guner       7
10. Fred Kamgar       5
11. Greg Kopp         2
12. Maira Costa       1
13. 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

A problem given by Sho Sengoku -- can you come up with an example of a position in a money game where you have only an 18.75% chance of winning the game, no chance of a gammon, and yet you can take a double?

Last Week's 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

White has racing equity and a five-point board. Could that be enough?

Generally speaking, racing equity and a good board can be enough. White has a path to victory by sneaking out. It's tough, but this could be a take!

Cube decision

Rollout cubeless equity +0.551

Cubeful equities:

1. Double, pass +1.000

2. Double, take +1.022 +0.022

3. No double +0.820 -0.180

Proper cube action: Redouble, pass

Rollout details

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

Player Black owns 2-cube 0.782 0.022 0.000 - 0.218 0.034 0.001 +0.551 +0.820

Standard error 0.000 0.000 0.000 - 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000

Player White owns 4-cube 0.789 0.026 0.000 - 0.211 0.034 0.001 +1.139 +1.022

Standard error 0.000 0.000 0.009 - 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.001 0.001

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

46656 games, Mersenne Twister dice gen. with seed 962891200 and quasi-random dice

Play: 0-ply cubeful [expert]

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

GNU thinks the decision is awfully close. Under the right match conditions, this could easily be a take!

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

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