What backgammon taught me about life

It’s time for some game theory?

I like games, and one I’ve been playing since childhood is backgammon. These days it’s less on a wooden board under the shade of an olive tree, and more on an app on my mobile phone. Today I want to talk about what kinds of life lessons I’ve drawn from my 14,000 games recently.

Backgammon is a game with dice and also with skill; it is a blend of randomness and strategy that appeals to me and which I think reflects to some extent the state of the real world.

The lessons below all pretty much add up to a theory of resilience and the overall conclusion is that in order to compete and profit in uncertain circumstances you need leverage, flexibility and the ability to lose. They are applicable in a real-life situation where sides are competing or in hostile negotiations. Profiting in the longer term will depend on creating a situation that is skewed to your advantage, rather than being able to carry out one stunning victory through particular technique. It leads to a form of strategic defence in depth.

Lesson 1. You can play your best and still lose

Since backgammon is a game with an element of chance, you can never guarantee victory, only increase its probability. You may do everything possible to use as best you can the dice you roll, and you may still lose – to a far worse player – simply because they were luckier.

Lesson 2. You need to be able to handle defeat

Since even the best players will lose quite a lot of the time you need to make sure that you don’t get totally knocked out by any one defeat. Either in terms of the tokens you’re betting, or your emotional resources. You need to build in a certain amount of ‘crumple room’ into your overall playing – like the way cars are designed so that they will crumple in a crash but still not crush the people inside. The best players will tend to win over a series of games, but they need to be handle their defeats to get there.

Lesson 3a. You best your opponent by limiting their freedom...

The game can never be predicted; backgammon is all about probability. Each individual number has a one in six chance of coming up (16.6%), as does the most likely result of two dice – seven. The higher or lower the values compared to seven are, the less chance they have of coming up, and the values 2 or 12 have a less than 3% chance of coming up.. So the key to victory is increasing the amount of ways that good things will happen for you if high-probability numbers come up, and make it so that your opponent needs far less likely outcomes to defeat you. If they need to get a 6 and a 1 to profit from a situation, while you only need to get a total of 7 to profit, then you are more than five times as likely to do well. However, over the course of playing a thousand matches, they will win in that position 30 times, so remember Lesson 2.

Lesson 3a… and by increasing yours

Diversify your options. A classic way to do this is to split your two running pieces at the start. Suddenly you have twice as many options with those two pieces. Likewise when you are developing pieces for an attack or a defence, try to arrange them so you will profit from the widest range of outcomes. Space your pieces out irregularly. You already start off with pieces set up for dice that are split by two, so place some pieces that are split by odd numbers as well. You build uo in this way your ability to benefit from different outcomes.

Lesson 4. If you have to get hit, get hit in the best way

You can’t always play it safe in backgammon. Sometimes in order to make the best move you have to leave pieces exposed to getting hit. Even if you have calculated that based on probability you have the best chance, you also need to plan for the worse-case scenario. So if you have to put your pieces in danger, try to make sure that they are exposed to your opponents own weak side, so that hitting them will also have costs for your opponent, for example by forcing them to split a point and open for your counter-attack. Make it so that in order to hit you, they have to put themselves in the worst possible place. Don’t offer them dream targets.

Lesson 5. Flexibility is key – be prepared to change ‘which game’ you’re playing

In backgammon you want to both get your own pieces home and also stop your opponent doing the same. This means sometimes you’ll be running and sometimes attacking. But depending on what your opponent does, or what the dice say, you may have to change your stance suddenly. For example go from running to fighting. This means even as you pursue one tactic you need to also be laying the ground for other tactics within that. Your runners should also be able to turn into fighters, and your attackers need to be able to suddenly defend, and the areas where you have been forced to by defeats, should also be seen as areas from where you can stage counter-attacks.

Lesson 6. The relationship between you and your opponent is key

Sitting face to face with someone there’s a lot of psychology and head-games involved in a match, especially one for money. But even online playing against an anonymous opponent who may, in fact, be a bot, there’s still a lot of personality to pick up on. Are they moving fast or slowly? Are they making moves then taking them back or are they confident? Are they eager to bet more money? How happy are they with risk-taking? And are they using an aggressive or a cautious strategy? Based on the answers to these questions you can put your opponent in an uncomfortable place by forcing them to play outside their comfort zone. Even bad moves, played fast and aggressively, against a slow and cautious player, may cause them to misjudge the situation and panic. Likewise if you slow down and play very deliberately against an aggressive player they may get frustrated and take bigger and worse risks, seeking to get back into their comfort zone.

Lesson 7. If your emotions take over you’ll probably lose

One thing I use backgammon for is as a mood gauge. My mood may change, but the rules of the game don’t change. My mood may change but mathematical probability remains the same. So if I find myself losing a lot of games then I’m probably stressed, distracted or ill. Over a series of games luck averages out, while skill remains. If I go through a period of losing a lot of tokens then I know something has gone wrong. My judgement is faulty. Often what happened is my pride took over and I started to believe I’d be more lucky than I really deserved to be by the laws of probability; or I started to have trouble backing down from being offered a bet. Being able to coldly assess the situation and walk away from a bad game before you lose all your tokens is crucial.

Lesson 8. In the absence of anything else, avoid being an idiot

Some moves are elegant and set the board up for a well-coordinated attack. Some allow you to defend while also developing pieces to be used later. Some moves, on the other hand, simply avoid being truly awful, or put off your approaching defeat for one single move. Don’t be tempted to play a move that is merely aesthetic or has the air of a good move, while it actually exposes you too much, or expects too much of the dice. Make awkward, inelegant moves and make moves that put you in an even worse position, if the alternative is to invite disaster.

And finally lesson 9. let luck find you

Maybe you’ll get that magical double-six and escape to victory, or get that magical combination that allows you to snipe your opponents piece at long range. You probably won’t. But if you’re losing you still need to do all you can to make yourself ready for a crazy piece of luck. Remember, they will happen 2.78% of the time; but you will only profit if you have set up your pieces so that they are there ready to welcome the luck if it comes.

Thank you for reading!

Loukas Christodoulou