My name is Malcolm Davis, I’m a professional Backgammon player. I’m here for expertvillage.com to hopefully teach you basically how to play. Let’s say that I roll and I roll a two-five. Okay now then this is my opponent’s two point, I have to start over, so I can come in with a two or the twenty-three point if you prefer. But I can’t come in on the five point, so I only bring one checker in. I have to pick up my dice and my opponent rolls. I just want to take a brief moment and to tell you what this is right here. This is the doubling cube. What this means, and you’ll being playing with friends or for bragging rights or whatever, but maybe even a match we can talk about later or the end of the tournament. The first double is two-two and you can only double when it’s your turn. Now my opponent is getting ready to roll, so he has the right to double if you play the game with a doubling cube which was introduced in the 1920s which makes the game much more interesting. You don’t have to play with a cube, you can play with a cube. At first you might not want to, but I want to tell you what this was. If my opponent doubled me in this position, I would pass. Now my choice would be to take this cube and to put it over here and say I take and take a chance now and lose two points or maybe even four points if I get gammoned which we can talk about in a second. But I would find it more prudent to pass because I’m in great danger here and I’m better off to give my opponent a point than to agree to play on and suffer the consequences losing possibly two or four. That’s all about the cube right now; we’re going to play this game without the cube. Now then, so my opponent rolls a number, let’s say that to make it simple because a lot of this will be redone, but let’s say he rolls double sixes, which is just a horrible number for me. So he would make the six here, notice one, two, three, four, five, six, making this point. So that that’s another point that I can’t use to enter from the roof. Now he will rush his checkers around the board to try to pound on this guy or pounce on him, so that I’m in enormous trouble. See here are two more sixes, notice we play four of them and this is the fourth six.
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