Newsletter for 6 April 2004

It's April... no foolin'!

On Tuesday, 6 April 2004, the Backgammon Club of San Diego met, and there was no fooling around -- we held yet another tournament.

Tournament News

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

First place: Tom Fahland
Second place: Henry Chaboki
Third place: Osman Guner

By finishing in second place, Henry scored master points for the first time this year.

Current Master Points Standings

Tom continues his march up the master point list, and is now in 3rd place. Jason Lee remains in first place, but Bruce Haight is still within striking distance, eight points behind.

 1. Jason Lee        39
 2. Bruce Haight     31
 3. Tom Fahland      26
 4. Adrian Costa     25
 5. Osman Guner      15
 6. Sho Sengoku      12
 7. Fred Kamgar      11
 8. Cyrus Mobedshahi 10
 9. Marcia Karen      9
10. Eric Sedehi       8
11. Henry Chaboki     4
12. Chris Rosin       2
12. Mark Weiner       2
12. Greg Kopp         2
15. Maira Costa       1
15. 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

Take the previous week's problem -- how many White checkers can you put on the ace point and still have a take?

Last Week's Problem of the Week

Black was playing an ace point game, finally hit a checker, and then forced White to jostle his checkers loose. Now what?

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

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

Money game. Pip counts: White 24, Black 100
Position ID: BQBAsM2mgQAEAA Match ID: UQkAAAAAAAAA

White easily has enough checkers off to nudge out a take. But have a look... GNU says to beaver this puppy!

Cube decision

Rollout cubeless equity +0.072

Cubeful equities:

1. No double +0.322

2. Double, pass +1.000 +0.678

3. Double, take -0.063 -0.385

Proper cube action: No redouble, beaver (36.2%)

Rollout details

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

Player Black owns 2-cube 0.587 0.000 0.000 - 0.413 0.088 0.015 +0.072 +0.322

Standard error 0.001 0.000 0.000 - 0.001 0.001 0.000 0.002 0.003

Player White owns 4-cube 0.596 0.000 0.000 - 0.404 0.084 0.015 +0.188 -0.063

Standard error 0.001 0.000 0.000 - 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.004 0.005

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

7776 games, Mersenne Twister dice gen. with seed 961591936 and quasi-random dice

Play: 0-ply cubeful [expert]

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

It's scary, but consider what happens if Black doesn't hit. White only needs and ace to be able to button up that last checker, and then will be a big favorite.

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

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