Alternative Rules for the Game of Backgammon

Video Transcript

"Hi! I am Grady Johnson and I am a competition backgammon player and today I am representing expertvillage.com. Now today I am going to go over some alternative rules for money play. Remember whenever you are playing for money whether it is a little bit of money or a lot of money, the rules needs to be hammered out very, very well in the beginning. You do not want people coming up with alternatives of the game halfway through; make it clear when you are playing for money that everyone must agree on the rules first. Now there are a few accepted forms of play out there that may not be in the standard rules but in a money game are pretty much considered standard. Now the first thing you need to be aware of is the Jacobi method. Now the Jacobi method ensures that the game is on the way to a gambling game before there are any other advantages. So you cannot get a gammon or a backgammon unless you have already doubled somewhere in the game. Now when you are playing with the Jacobi rule, you will have to at least bet once and at least have one challenge before you can ever get a gammon or a backgammon. Now another pretty well accepted rule is something called a beaver. Now beavers will give an advantage to the opponent who is being doubled against and it does increase the money of the game. Now if you are going to play this, you will find this will highly competitive players who are always trying to sort of jack up the pot, what this means is when you do a double on an opponent say you went ahead and said I am going to give you a two. He can immediately double that to a four if he feels confident in the game and still retain possession of the doubling cube effectively giving them a second redouble. So whenever you are making that challenge you better be sure that it is going your way because your challenger will put that back on you and up the stakes very quickly. This can sometimes turn into a very aggressive game play especially when you factor in later in the game the ability to gammon or backgammon can completely rule the day. Now finally what we do have is something called an automatic double which is pretty great. What this means is that if you roll the dice to start and you get a double situation like you roll a five and he rolls a five and you have to roll over again, that would automatically double your cue. Keep in mind there are some alternatives out there that we may not have discussed today. Make sure you guy’s all work it out before you start putting your money down."