Some bad advice

[peps...@gmail.com]

I read this:
"What’s the best way to quickly improve your backgammon skills? Cube actions, Doubling theory, Strategy theory?

It’s improving your opening game! Why?

Almost every single game you will play the first 2-3 rolls."

Ummm, no. It's not the best time investment if your opening understanding
is already reasonable.
And, if you do the odd missteps, losing 0.02 equity occasionally because
you haven't memorized the opening, you may bluff your opponent into thinking
you're weaker than you are, and that bluff is worth tons of equity (much more
than 0.02) if successful.

Paul

[ah...Clem]

Well, there's no excuse for not bothering to learn the 15 distinct
opening rolls. OTOH, the 600+ replies are not so easy to learn, and
there are just too many third rolls for any human to memorize.

Agree that giving up .02 equity in the opening is not most intermediate
players' biggest problem, but "bluffing" in not terribly useful to me -
I mostly play on FIBS and my rating is there for everyone to see,

So, what is the best way to improve? Probably cube action, and if you
play matches rather than unlimited learning the take points for scores
less than 5a5a is worth the effort.

[Nasti Chestikov]

On Monday, 29 August 2022 at 14:47:51 UTC+1, ah...Clem wrote:

> Well, there's no excuse for not bothering to learn the 15 distinct
> opening rolls.

I've always played an opening roll of 6-3 as 24-18 24-21.

XG rebuked me and told me 24-18 13-10 was optimum.

Except, of course, the cocksucking bots don't tell you why.

GNUDung is no better. Give us a clue FFS.

[peps...@gmail.com]

I agree with this. Good advice here.
And it's probably a good idea to buy and read the book Tim bought recently
(can't remember the name, and I'm too lazy to search for it).

Paul

[Axel Reichert]

"peps...@gmail.com" <peps...@gmail.com> writes:

> losing 0.02 equity occasionally because you haven't memorized the
> opening, you may bluff your opponent into thinking you're weaker than
> you are, and that bluff is worth tons of equity (much more than 0.02)
> if successful.

Maybe you are right about the bluff, but weaker opening moves are not
immediately rewarded by much weaker reply moves (which I believed and
advocated. From

https://bkgm.com/articles/Reichert/first-two-rolls.pdf

However, I strongly recommend using only this single latter list for
both match play and money games. The reason is that the correct reply
moves against D or $ are sometimes non-intuitive (e. g., many
opponents, especially up to intermediate level, will not dare to
slot). To accept a small equity loss by playing an opening mistake
will thus hopefully induce a much larger reply error by our opponent
and easily compensate us.

).

But when I did the maths some months later, it turned out that 32D, 41$,
and 51$ (where my recommended opening moves deviate from the current
"best" and immediately lose 0.0132, 0.0153, 0.0157 of equity,
respectively) do not pay off against intermediates too timid to slot or
play two down:

Let us assume a "splitter" will hit if possible, after the hit aim for
"4 on mid" (non-doublet, with the exception of 24/20*/14) or make
additional points in his board (doublet), and play 65R, P, 43Z, S when
no hit is possible.

Against 32D he will erroneously play 21S, 41S, 51S, 32S, 24/21(2)
13/10(2), and 43Z. This loses (according to XG's opening book data) on
average 0.0056. This is smaller than 0.0132 (your 32D loss) and thus in
sum he will have gained after two rolls from your inferior opening move.

For 41$ the replier loses 0.0044 (< 0.0153), for 51$ it is (including
the whopper 24/20*(2) 6/2(2)!) a meagre 0.0088 (< 0.0157).

For me the bottom line is now: Opening gambits may be fun, but do not
pay, because there are too few opportunities for your opponent to go
wrong.

Best regards

Axel

[peps...@gmail.com]

Interesting thoughts, but that's not the kind of bluff I meant.
If your opponent thinks you're weaker than you are, it can lead to
weaker play from consistent underestimation (for example, bad cube actions).
I didn't expect that the bluff would pay off immediately.

Now, there's the objection to my view:
"But you could use that as an argument for any weak play at any time."
Of course, sacrificing huge amounts of equity is unlikely to be sensible.
The opening is somewhat unusual in that the differences between the reasonable
choices are less than they are in most phases of the game.
Also, if you do a suboptimal play in the early opening, the opponent might know with
100% certainty that you have erred, and underestimate you, whereas if you do a
suboptimal play deep into the game, the opponent might not so eagerly underestimate
you because they won't know for sure that you were wrong until the bot verdict.

On the subject of suboptimal plays, one obvious example is premature resignation.
This particular type of minute error doesn't seem to correlate with strength.
In fact, if the gammon is out of the question, but you can win the race with a positive
probability that is < 1 in a million, a beginner is far more likely to attempt the miracle than
a world-class player.
I never deliberately surrender equity in this way.

Paul

[Timothy Chow]

On 8/30/2022 3:46 AM, peps...@gmail.com wrote:
> And it's probably a good idea to buy and read the book Tim bought recently
> (can't remember the name, and I'm too lazy to search for it).

I think you mean "The Theory of Backgammon," by Dirk Schiemann.

---
Tim Chow

[Timothy Chow]

On 8/29/2022 9:47 AM, ah...Clem wrote:
> Well, there's no excuse for not bothering to learn the 15 distinct
> opening rolls. OTOH, the 600+ replies are not so easy to learn, and
> there are just too many third rolls for any human to memorize.

Back in 2016, there was an interesting discussion on BGOnline about
memorizing third rolls.

http://www.bgonline.org/forums/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=192924

It depends on what you mean by "memorizing third rolls," but I'm sure
that by some definitions, memorizing all third rolls is certainly a
feasible task for top memory athletes.

Stick claimed that "memorizing all the third rolls over a couple month
span would be easily doable" for him. If we're talking about 100%
accuracy then I don't believe him, but of course there's no way to
settle the bet, since even though he claims that it would be "easily"
doable, a few thousand dollars is not enough to entice him to try.
Another reason I don't believe him is that he claimed to know all
the world capitals, but when I gave a quick pop quiz (South Sudan,
St. Lucia, Palau, Montenegro, Myanmar, Cote d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Sri
Lanka) he didn't reply, demonstrating to me that he's not in the habit
of memorizing even that amount of information with 100% completeness,
let alone the amount of information involved in memorizing third rolls.

I have a pretty good memory. I like the trivia quiz website Sporcle,
and I can usually score 100% when I try to list all world capitals,
or the periodic table, or all the constellations, or the top 200 names
in the Bible, or the full text of various famous poems. For these
tasks, I use only "natural" memory and almost no mnemonic tricks.
However, memorizing all third rolls is on another level. For anyone
who's not Kim Peek, it would require systematic application of formal
memorization techniques to achieve 100% accuracy. Stick, I think, is
misled by the fact that a large percentage of third rolls is already
known to him because of general backgammon knowledge (we all know how
to play 66 after both players have played 8/5 6/5), but he hasn't
calculated how much "residual" information has to be memorized after
"natural" memory leaves off, and so underestimates the amount of
effort required.

---
Tim Chow

[Stick Rice]

The claim that I believe was made is that memorizing all third rolls that are reasonable/natural occurring/ however you want to phrase it is easily doable. In other words, I don't care about memorizing even something like 62R-XX-XX. Why? Because I'll never play 62R. Why? Because nobody who is a reasonable bg player should be playing it either. And yes, it would be easy. Believe what you want. If you think it's so hard and others do also, you could pool your money to make a bet on whether it could be done or not and reach an amount where it would be worth doing for me. I think you've greatly underestimated the amount of time I've put into them already if you don't think I understand the effort involved or how much is lacking from my backgammon knowledge alone. My memory in general is fine, it's not great but not subpar either. For things that I actually care about/am interested in though, my memory is keeps me in the black.


Tim is also way off base saying " Another reason I don't believe him is that he claimed to know all the world capitals, but when I gave a quick pop quiz...". You asked me about some world capitals 5 days later. I didn't reply I'm sure because it proves less than nothing if I answer a thread where I could just as easily look up the answers online and spit them out saying I knew them. I also stated "I've done the world capitals too myself because I like geography to a degree and it seemed like it would be worth it for my trivia nights." This isn't the same as what you said I said "Another reason I don't believe him is that he claimed to know all the world capitals".

If anyone wants the original thread here it is: http://www.bgonline.org/forums/webbbs_config.pl?read=192924

I stand by everything I said in that thread and other relating threads.

Stick

[Timothy Chow]

On 8/30/2022 3:31 PM, Stick Rice wrote:
> If you think it's so hard and others do also, you could pool your money to make a bet on whether it could be done or not and reach an amount where it would be worth doing for me.

What's that amount?

---
Tim Chow

[Timothy Chow]

On 8/30/2022 3:31 PM, Stick Rice wrote:

> but when I gave a quick pop quiz (South Sudan,
> St. Lucia, Palau, Montenegro, Myanmar, Cote d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Sri
> Lanka)

> Tim is also way off base saying " Another reason I don't believe him is that he claimed to know all the world capitals, but when I gave a quick pop quiz...". You asked me about some world capitals 5 days later. I didn't reply I'm sure because it proves less than nothing if I answer a thread where I could just as easily look up the answers online and spit them out saying I knew them.

Tell me, do you know the capitals of the above countries off the top
of your head? I will assume you are honorable and won't cheat.

---
Tim Chow

[Timothy Chow]

On 8/30/2022 3:31 PM, Stick Rice wrote:

> Tim is also way off base saying " Another reason I don't believe him is that he claimed to know all the world capitals, but when I gave a quick pop quiz...". You asked me about some world capitals 5 days later. I didn't reply I'm sure because it proves less than nothing if I answer a thread where I could just as easily look up the answers online and spit them out saying I knew them. I also stated "I've done the world capitals too myself because I like geography to a degree and it seemed like it would be worth it for my trivia nights." This isn't the same as what you said I said "Another reason I don't believe him is that he claimed to know all the world capitals".

To save people the trouble of looking up the original thread, Stick
made the above statement in response to the following statement that
I made:

> I occasionally engage in moderate memory tasks just for the fun of
it, > e.g., memorizing all the world capitals (about 200) or memorizing
the > full text of one of the shorter books of the Bible. What I've
found is > that it's relatively easy to perform at a 95% or even a 99%
level, but > 100% mastery is very difficult, especially if one wishes to
retain the > information permanently.

As you can see, I took pains to emphasize 100% mastery and not just 99%
mastery, and I said how many world capitals I was talking about (about
200). Any list of 200 world capitals would certainly include the ones
I listed. Responding "I've done the world capitals too myself" when I
have just emphasized memorizing ~200 capitals with 100% (not just 99%)
accuracy, and then later claiming that "I wasn't claiming to know all
the world capitals" is typical Stick disingenuousness.

---
Tim Chow

[peps...@gmail.com]

I know this is a dialogue between you and Stick but I'd just like to state where I stand on the list of capitals
in parentheses. I thought that the capital of Myanmar is Rangoon and the capital of Sri Lanka is Colombo,
but I was (and still am) clueless about all the others.
After googling, I realise that I was right about Sri Lanka, but wrong about Myanmar. It's tough when
the capital is much less known than the largest city.
If capital meant "most populous city" (which it doesn't), then we would get a clean correspondence between
countries (or nation states or regions etc.) and capitals because it's incredibly unlikely that two large towns
or cities would happen to have exactly the same population.
Without googling, I think capital means something like "Administrative centre" or "seat of government".
If it does mean that, I find it somewhat odd that people assume a clean correspondence between nations
and capitals. In a large country it might make a lot of sense to have more than one administrative centre
to minimize the need for the representatives to travel or to avoid crammed buildings.
But maybe each country has a unique administrative town/city in practice -- I can't think of a country which has
more than one.

On the Tim/Stick debate, my tentative conclusions are:
1) Stick's claims about his memory and what he said about his memory may be true or mostly true.
He certainly hasn't been caught in a lie here.
2) If what he said about himself is mostly true, rather than absolutely true, then there's no reason to
make a fuss about it. We're not making legal statements here for a court of law.
3) On this thread, there were some completely unnecessary attacks on Stick which were unprovoked
and completely unjustifiable in context. For example, "Stick claimed ... but I don't believe him" is just
unnecessary inflammatory language. To say "I was only saying the truth" is not enough of a justification.
For example, if in the middle of a thread about backgammon, you said "Paul is seriously overweight and maybe even obese",
you would be saying the absolute truth but I would still consider it unjustifiable and offensive.
4) Now, we get to my OTOH comment. After many years experience with this forum where Stick has been active,
I do believe he has exaggerated his abilities but only slightly. For example, someone who was totally honest
would sometimes say "Wow, I got this problem wrong big time! My play is a whopper... I misunderstood..."
But Stick never says anything like that. Whenever he answers on a problem thread, he cites the correct answer.

Paul

[Timothy Chow]

On 8/31/2022 3:51 AM, peps...@gmail.com wrote:
> I know this is a dialogue between you and Stick but I'd just like to state where I stand on the list of capitals
> in parentheses. I thought that the capital of Myanmar is Rangoon and the capital of Sri Lanka is Colombo,
> but I was (and still am) clueless about all the others.
> After googling, I realise that I was right about Sri Lanka, but wrong about Myanmar. It's tough when
> the capital is much less known than the largest city.

Colombo for Sri Lanka is morally correct, but technically it's
Sri Jayawardenapura Kotte.

> Without googling, I think capital means something like "Administrative centre" or "seat of government".
> If it does mean that, I find it somewhat odd that people assume a clean correspondence between nations
> and capitals. In a large country it might make a lot of sense to have more than one administrative centre
> to minimize the need for the representatives to travel or to avoid crammed buildings.
> But maybe each country has a unique administrative town/city in practice -- I can't think of a country which has
> more than one.

Most countries state officially what city is the capital city.
There are a few countries where the different functions of
government are located in different cities; South Africa is
perhaps the most prominent one (Pretoria, Cape Town, and
Bloemfontein). A more complicated example is Bolivia, where
Sucre is the official capital but the de facto administrative
capital is La Paz, and there is a history of conflict behind
the split.

> On the Tim/Stick debate, my tentative conclusions are:
> 1) Stick's claims about his memory and what he said about his memory may be true or mostly true.
> He certainly hasn't been caught in a lie here.

True.

> 2) If what he said about himself is mostly true, rather than absolutely true, then there's no reason to
> make a fuss about it. We're not making legal statements here for a court of law.
> 3) On this thread, there were some completely unnecessary attacks on Stick which were unprovoked
> and completely unjustifiable in context. For example, "Stick claimed ... but I don't believe him" is just
> unnecessary inflammatory language. To say "I was only saying the truth" is not enough of a justification.
> For example, if in the middle of a thread about backgammon, you said "Paul is seriously overweight and maybe even obese",
> you would be saying the absolute truth but I would still consider it unjustifiable and offensive.

If your only context is r.g.b. then I agree. But this is a
a continuation of an exchange that began on BGOnline where
Stick challenged a claim that I made, without providing evidence.
Stick actually claimed even more, that various other people would
be able to perform the memorization feat in question, and he was
shocked when Bob Koca said that he (Bob) would be highly unlikely
to be able to do it. I brought up world capitals as part of an
effort to explain the basis for my original assessment of the
difficulty of the task. When Stick said "me too," he clearly was
making a bid to claim that his own experience with memorization
was comparable to mine. Therefore I probed him to see if it really
was comparable. Based on his response, I judged that it wasn't,
and his response here confirms that---he's basically saying that
he never claimed to have memorized the world capitals to a comparable
level that I have, even though what he said (in context) gave a very
strong impression that he *was* claiming that.

All this is not irrelevant to the point about third rolls. Anticipating
that Stick reads r.g.b. and would likely make a confident assertion
that he could "easily" memorize all third rolls, I wanted to point out
that Stick's claims about his own memory aren't always what they seem
to be and that if you press him on something that is directly testable,
he may back down.

Last time around, he said that a few thousand dollars would be
insufficient motivation for him to perform this "easy" task, so I'm
curious as to what the going rate is.

---
Tim Chow

[peps...@gmail.com]

Ok, thanks for the clarification.
I almost never read bgonline so this wasn't part of my context.
Re "Anticipating that .... I wanted to point out...", I think a much
better approach [by you] would be to wait until Stick actually says
what you anticipate before making your point, and avoid making your point
otherwise. But chacun a son gout.

Paul

[Stick Rice]

I feel like sometimes you miss the entire story that I feel should be obvious and in my lack of caring nowadays and the exhaustion it takes to explain things ... I said "I've done the world capitals myself". I'll give you this implies in context at one point I knew all the world capitals however having done them at some point doesn't mean I would remember them all right now was my point I thought should be clear. Just as if I took on this backgammon project and learned all the third rolls and won the bet in a few months I wouldn't expect to know them all 100% years from now without periodical refreshing.

"What's that amount?"

I'm not sure, the more the better. Start at 50k and go up.

While I did mention Koca and Yep as potentials to do it, they were the "hell, I bet even UBK and Chris ...", they weren't my first string players. People like Nack or Jake are too smart to get involved in these petty online back and forths when they basically know nothing is coming of it. I'm not as smart as they are, so here I am. It's why many players are more liked than others, they just keep their mouths shut for various reasons whereas I prefer sticking the truth out there loud as day.

"Tell me, do you know the capitals of the above countries off the top of your head?"

I don't know the capital of Palau in the time it takes to answer a Jeopardy question. Maybe if I sat around and thought about it going through the alphabet it would spring to mind. For instance, last night at trivia we had a presidents round where you had to name the president and what number president he was. (Washington #1, Lincoln #16, Trump #45 etc...) At one point in my life I had memorized them all in order but never really using that information in the short period of time that we had in that round I scribbled probably 2/3rds of them down with their numerical placement. I would need another 15 minutes to think of the rest and get them into order nowadays.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGQPGjSUQdg

Stick

[Timothy Chow]

On 8/31/2022 6:02 PM, Stick Rice wrote:
> I'm not sure, the more the better. Start at 50k and go up.

At what odds?

> People like Nack or Jake are too smart to get involved in these petty online back and forths when they basically know nothing is coming of it.

They got involved somewhat when you invited them to weigh in.

http://www.bgonline.org/forums/webbbs_config.pl?read=193513

None of them thought it would be "easy," which you claimed (and
apparently still claim) it would be.

One thing that emerged from the discussion, which caused me to
modify my views slightly from what they were originally, was that
it makes a big difference exactly what the format of the test is.
I was initially envisaging a list of about 10,000 Nactation lines
such as 31P-31P-66B. If this is the format then I still believe
that a memory athlete would indeed find it easy to regurgitate the
entire list from memory, whereas I don't think that any backgammon
expert without serious training in memorization techniques would
find it easy, and maybe no backgammon expert could do it with 100%
accuracy without essentially training as a memory athlete and
mastering those techniques.

But if you tilt the scales by changing the format, presenting people
with randomly (or adversarially) chosen backgammon positions and
having them play the move, then this would certainly help the
backgammon player and make things harder for the memory athlete.
I'd still bet on the memory athlete, but with less confidence.
This is not because I think a favorable format would make the task
"easy" for the backgammon player---it would still be hard---but the
format might mean that it would be no longer easy for the memory
athlete either.

---
Tim Chow

[Stick Rice]

They didn't get involved, they talked to me directly again sidestepping the nonsense. I also don't think I called it *easy*. I called it *easily doable* (with the implication of motivation, mainly monetarily). Again, two wildly different things. And it is easily doable. I'm offering no odds because you don't think it is, why would I offer odds?

Stick

[Timothy Chow]

On 9/1/2022 3:19 AM, Stick Rice wrote:
> They didn't get involved, they talked to me directly again sidestepping the nonsense. I also don't think I called it *easy*. I called it *easily doable* (with the implication of motivation, mainly monetarily). Again, two wildly different things. And it is easily doable. I'm offering no odds because you don't think it is, why would I offer odds?

Beautiful! This is worth the entire "price" of the conversation.
"Easy" is wildly different from "easily doable." A worthy competitor
to Bill Clinton's iconic, "It depends on what the meaning of the word
'is' is."

For the record, here's a quote from the same "world capitals" thread:

> I've done the world capitals too myself because I like geography to
> a degree and it seemed like it would be worth it for my trivia nights.

> Things like this are easy to do, like the 2nd rolls, like the 3rd
> rolls, you have to break up the information into small pieces.

But I get it, just because it's "easy to do" and just because you
compared the task to memorizing world capitals (which you presumably
didn't get $50,000 for doing), doesn't mean that it's "easy." Being
"easy" and "easy to do" are wildly different things. I actually
agree with this...it sure is easy if you don't have to do anything!

---
Tim Chow

[peps...@gmail.com]

"Easy" and "easy to do" mean the same thing.
However, when used as an adverb, "easily" doesn't necessarily reference effort.
"Easily" sometimes mean that a determination is clear.
For example, "Magnus Carlsen is easily the greatest living human chess player."
So "easily doable" could well mean "It's easy to make the determination that the task is doable"
even if the task isn't easy. It's a little bit ambiguous, I think.
But Stick is making a lot more sense than you give him credit for.

Here's a natural and common usage of what I think is Stick's intended meaning.
Defence Lawyer: "The accused couldn't possibly have been at Lanford Avenue at the time
of the murder because a CCTV camera shows him at Crenshaw St, 5 minutes earlier which is
more than a km away, and the defendant had no car, bike, or other means of transport.

Prosecution: "But the accused is a world-class runner! It's easily possible that he ran to Lanford Avenue
in five minutes.

This doesn't say that the run would have been easy -- just that it's clearly possible.

Paul

[Timothy Chow]

On 9/1/2022 9:58 AM, peps...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, September 1, 2022 at 2:33:51 PM UTC+1, Tim Chow wrote:

>> For the record, here's a quote from the same "world capitals" thread:
>>> I've done the world capitals too myself because I like geography to
>>> a degree and it seemed like it would be worth it for my trivia nights.
>>> Things like this are easy to do, like the 2nd rolls, like the 3rd
>>> rolls, you have to break up the information into small pieces.

> "Easy" and "easy to do" mean the same thing.

That suffices for my point.

---
Tim Chow