Tag Archives: position
Improve your Backgammon Game
Are you familiar with the rules on how to play backgammon but lack confidence to really improve your backgammon game? Online backgammon is as much about attitude as it is about skill. You may be an experienced player or a skillful novice, but if you don’t take chances you’re unlikely to reach your full potential. The following tips and pointers are designed with you in mind. Maybe you’re new to the world of internet backgammon or you’ve just finished playing your first backgammon board game. Or perhaps you’re a seasoned backgammon fan but a little out of practice? Regardless of your circumstances, you can substantially increase your success at the game by using some of the following strategies in your game.
One of the best pieces of advice any backgammon professional can give you is to study your opponent’s game plan. Try and learn as much information as you can on his strengths and weaknesses. Keeping note of how he performs can help you to recognize his habits. Does he have an aggressive or defensive backgammon strategy? Is he confident to bet large sums of money on his game? How does he use the backgammon board to his advantage and which common escape routes does he use to deflect your game plan? The answers to these questions can help you pre-empt your opponent’s next move and will reduce his chances of winning.
Now we’ll take a look at some specific backgammon strategies to help you improve your game. If you want to prevent your opponent from transporting his checkers safely to his home board, you can adopt the Priming strategy. To do this, you erect a wall of checkers covering at least six points on the board. If you want to be extra aggressive, try blocking your home board as soon as you can which will prevent your opponent from reintroducing checkers to the board.
If your opponent is in a more favorable position than you are, you may be able to distract him from his game plan by applying the Backgame and Holding strategies. The first relates to the construction of two or more anchors in your opponent’s home board. The latter involves attempting to hit your opponent’s checkers as he brings them toward his home board. This strategy can often force a confident player into defensive mode and give you valuable time to catch up to him.
Lastly, if it appears that you are in the strongest position to win the backgammon game, why not try the Running strategy? This is simply moving your checkers as fast as you can around the board while keeping a wary eye out for your opponent’s traps. A useful tip if you are Running is to keep your checkers in pairs to avoid hits.
If you follow this advice, you can increase the enjoyment you get when you play backgammon, as well as increase your success at backgammon gambling.
Poker Tips for Beginners (Part 2): Blind Stealing
If it folds to you in late position and you decide to open for a raise, then a large portion of your profits will usually come from the times the blinds fold. Being able to accurately assess the conditions for stealing blinds will allow you to add a lot of money to your win-rate without much effort. The idea behind poker tips for beginners should be to make the most money with the least amount of complicated poker theory, and a basic understanding of stealing blinds achieves just that.
On the most basic level, everyone left to act will fold some percentage of the time on average. If everyone folds often enough, then you can be raising with any two cards. For example, if you open raise to three times the big blind, and everyone folds a total of 70%, then that means 70% of the time you win 1.5 big blinds, and 30% of the time you lose 3 big blinds. If we plug that into an EV equation, we get the following:
EV = 0.70(1.5) + 0.30(-3)
EV = 1.05 – 0.90
EV = 0.15
So on average, your blind steal by itself is worth 0.15 big blinds. That might not seem like much, but remember that if the blinds were $1/2, that’s $0.30 made from one action. If you had this chance every hand, you’d be making $30 per 100 hands just from blind stealing.
There are a few general factors we can think about that contribute to the EV of a blind steal. First is how the people left to act tend to play. In general, people who fold a lot are gold to our left, and people who 3-bet a lot aren’t much fun to have on our left. People who call a lot can be good or bad depending on how they play after the flop, and whether or not we have position.
Another important factor for consideration is the size of our raise. If we raise to four times the big blind, we need our opponents to fold a lot more than if we raise to three times the big blind. Against the right opponents, it can even be correct to minraise pre-flop, as long as we’re in position. Open minraising from the small blind is pretty terrible since the big blind is getting 3:1 to see a flop, meaning he will call a huge percentage of the time, and he will have position for the rest of the hand, which puts us at a huge disadvantage post-flop.