Opening Statistics and Match Play for Backgammon Games

Abstract

Players of complex board games like backgammon, chess and go, were always wondering what the best opening moves for their favourite game are. In the last decade, computer analysis has offered more insight to many opening variations. This is especially true for backgammon, where computer rollouts have radically changed the way human experts play the opening. In this paper we use Palamedes, the winner of the latest computer backgammon Olympiad, to make the first ever computer assisted analysis of the opening rolls for the backgammon variants Portes, Plakoto and Fevga (collectively called Tavli in Greece). We then use these results to build effective match strategies for each game variant.