Backgammon lessons from DBC PIERRE

Take it from a Booker winner: if you want to grasp how the world really works – and come out on top – play backgammon

My parents kindled my interest in books by reading to me at bedtime. I recently thought back to that birthplace of imagination and recalled among the piggies, the giants, the tugboats and foxes, some books were Trojan horses, loaded with mental hacks.

The one I remember most is The Little Engine That Could. It told of a train breaking down while hauling toys to some children on the other side of a mountain, which was life-and-death drama for me. A number of big passing engines made excuses not to pull it, whereas a little blue engine with eyes on its smokestack cheerily agreed, and set off up the slope with a rhythmic mantra: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. And it could.

Some 30 years later I sat at a screen going over the mountain of my first novel and found myself reciting the mantra. It occurs to me now that discovering and weighing the impact of our will on nature has been a lifelong side project. But it’s so easy to rewrite our narratives after a win, shaking them into chains of purposeful action and mastery over fortune, when what I wanted to see was the mechanism. I wanted to see how the little train’s words pushed the rods that moved the wheels uphill.

Barely 15 years after those bedtimes, maybe 20 before the climb of my book, fortune showed me a model. It was in the game of backgammon. In less than a year I saw – or thought I saw, which was enough – the rods and beams of our will making marks on the world.

I must have still been at school, or barely out, when an older friend in a circle of despots who had taken me under their wing gave me a course in the other Game of Kings. He was a Vietnam veteran with an alligator’s grin, and his technique with beginners was simple: he played for money and punished you from the outset.

Backgammon can be traced back almost 5,000 years to Mesopotamia, a region where it’s still furiously played, unchanged with its chips (or “checkers” or “men”) and two dice; and most of those 5,000 years managed to elapse before some twisted soul added the doubling cube, which is to peace-of-mind what a ski-jump is to panic. A friendly £10 bet can swell exponentially before the fizz has even died in your drink, as the cube – doubling from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 32 and 64, then sprouting zeros all the way to infinity – is offered, reoffered and even “beavered” (accepted and immediately redoubled). If you don’t accept, you forfeit, and beginners haven’t the wisdom to know when to forfeit; so after a few volleys with my gator friend I had no choice but to take the game seriously, and even more crucially, to win. I watched as alarm began to infect my relationship with the dice, I found myself talking to them, in silence and then aloud, and in that willing, under a threat of pain or elation, not in the first game or the third or the tenth, but before too long, a watershed came where my focus seemed to bring control. I felt connected, and even when I was losing there was a palpable sympathy between my needs, my will, even words spoken over the table – and the result.

A famous legal challenge in Oregon in 1982 established that backgammon is not a game of chance: the state had argued that backgammon should be subject to gambling laws, but it was shown that although the dice dictate the number of spaces you can move, assessing risks and making the right moves is what wins or loses games. Moreover, the information needed to make the best move is before you, nothing is occult as in poker; it’s a game of skill. My veteran mentor would play without dice-cups, warming the dice in his hand, rubbing and cracking and wishing and willing, and I did this too, not to cheat but to grip the current of chance that beamed on this 24-inch stage; and in the fever of a heady series it’s uncanny how often you can throw the numbers you need.

After a while psychology also came to the table, and with it the little blue train and its lesson chugged back. I began to win against the mentor, so he then started every game by announcing that I would lose. It set me back for a little while, as his sledging gained colour and force, it showed just how promiscuous the mind can be when it comes to adopting suggestions; but with The Little Engine That Could up my sleeve, I set about grasping this new level of play, the final stage, where mathematics, the conscious and subconscious all marshalled together. I had not only to throw the best numbers and make the best moves against an opposing will, I had to generate timely propaganda and ignore any that came my way.

A few things grew apparent. One was that fear and confidence were easy to detect, regardless of any bluster. Losers would huddle and tighten like pretzels, while winners played big and wide. What’s more I could swear our postures were self-fulfilling: if one changed at any point, at a sudden shift in the game, it would seal our fate from there on in, even when conditions changed back. I couldn’t say how much these learnings came to bear outside the game at the time, but they were coding things in the background, they were an upgrade from a free Train version to full-featured

Little Train Pro.

I made some money from backgammon for a year or two, a pair of us did. Our long season of play had a grand finale which saw us take a foreign executive for 10 grand on his first night in town, in a club atop a cavernous hotel. Fair and square and affably. We bought him lunch the next day, and even imagined we’d become a trio. But adulthood blew in like a gale and scattered us to new lives.

The day you buy your favourite car it can seem the roads are full of them, and so it was with backgammon sets at the time, ubiquitous upholstered slimline briefcases lurking with their ploys. You wondered if the leather and marble sets taught the same things as your plastic and felt. I still have mine, rusted around its latches from adventures, with its crumbs and stains and echoes of maths. I’m sure the other two have theirs, though who knows. We never tested those fortunes again – but we always knew we could.

In the fever of a series it’s uncanny how often you can throw the numbers you need

Meanwhile in Dopamine City by DBC Pierre (Faber) is out now

GAME OF KINGS Backgammon