Backgammon

You've heard "it's just a race" more times than you can count — and you still lose close races you probably should have won, because counting, bearing in, and bearing off all have real, learnable decisions you've never actually been taught.

Races decide a large share of games, and improvers treat them as "just roll the dice." Counting fast, the doubling guidelines for a race, wastage and crossovers, efficient bear-in, accurate bear-off, and the timing that makes a holding game work are all learnable and mostly untaught in one place. The pip count alone lies — this book teaches the corrections.

Inside:

• Counting fast without sacrificing accuracy: mirror counting, cluster counting, the Trice count, and counting the difference instead of both sides.
• The race-cube guideposts with their reasoning made explicit, plus the effective pip count that corrects the raw number for wastage, gaps, and checkers already off.
• Bearing in efficiently: filling gaps, avoiding stacks, crossover efficiency, and which checkers actually need to come home first.
• Bearing off against contact, bearing off to save (or chase) a gammon, and the specific low-checker-count shapes worth memorising cold.
• Holding games reframed specifically as race management — a race you're behind in, managed through an anchor instead of lost outright — including the precise hold-or-run timing and the double-shot position.
• A race-specific review loop that closes the book.

Depends on Books 1 through 3's foundations. Written for players who know the rules and the basic race and are ready to stop treating it as pure luck.

All diagrams appear in full color in this eBook edition (the paperback interior remains black-and-white for print).

Backgammon Uncovered, Book 4. Builds on the first three books; the series concludes with The Study Nobody Teaches You.