Backgammon is enjoying a revival

WASHINGTON: Fans include hedge-fund analysts, who treat backgammon as a workout for both the mind and the adrenal glands – a speedy way to wager money playing the odds over and over again.

Then there are the tech types and neuroscientists who have been using the game to build the artificial brains of supercomputers. And the socialites who have been growing giddy to enjoy a leisure experience that summons vintage visions of jet-set preps.

If forced to pick one moment to represent backgammon’s conquest of the idle hours of our time, I would point to the morning of September 29, 2015, when the MacArthur Foundation announced its “genius grants” and one awardee tweeted that he’d received the news groggily: “BTW, slept in because we paid off my wife’s student loans yesterday and we celebrated with wine and backgammon.”

Meanwhile, the rest of us are likely to spend commutes absorbed in smartphone games whose developers report backgammon offerings as outranking their board-game brethren.

“Certainly, there is more interest in recent years,” said Max Parker, chairman of Geoffrey Parker Games, regarded as the world’s top board-game manufacturer. The backgammon boom has created a new market for Parker’s bespoke boards and competition sets.

Backgammon descends from games played in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, but it assumed its modern character only in the 1920s with the introduction of “doubling” to raise the stakes rapidly. This accelerated its popularity as a gambling game, thereby ensuring its somewhat louche glamour.

Backgammon expert Chris Bray has written that the game “seems to flourish when there is disposable income”. And yet each apex of its popularity has followed a financial crash, as in 1929 and 1973.

The top-ranked player in the US is Victor Ashkenazi, a vicepresident at Goldman Sachs.

“There are a lot of traders and hedge-fund guys playing,” said Bill Riles, president and executive director of the US Backgammon Federation. “The game theory and riskand-reward aspects relate to business and relate to life.”

Riles’s organisation observes that the number of people entering US national tournaments rose 35 percent between 2014 and 2016. “I can sit down and teach anybody how to play in 15 minutes,” he said. “It’s a very simple game, but someone like myself is still learning about its intricacies after 40 years.”

Some newcomers to the game would have been content, 10 or 15 years ago, simply to play poker. But as veterans of the game know, playing poker well involves a lot of folding bad hands and just sitting there, studying faces.

Backgammon is constant action, which is key to its appeal. Parker tells the anecdote of a billionaire backgammon fiend who, after spending thousands buying sets as gifts, asked Parker to suggest something new. Parker proposed his company’s luxury Scrabble boards. The client asked: “What’s Scrabble?”

On the contrary, the conversation pointed to a further aspect of the game’s appeal in our fast-paced age. “You play a game in nine minutes over a glass of wine, make a deal, and move on to the next thing,” Parker said. – The Washington Post

Backgammon descends from games played in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.