Hope and Anchor 
versus 
Trouble and Strife 
BANK HOLIDAY 
QUARTER-FINAL SPECIAL
by
Simon Gasquoine


At double match point in another epic match, the low cunning of Hope and 
Anchor (Simon G and Sonia) finally triumphed over the skill of Trouble and Strife (Andy 
and Sue) with an unsporting late bear-off 66. It was a great match in which both sides 
faced an exceptional number of tricky decisions. Here are two which Snowie in the post 
mortem reckoned to be too close to call and which illustrate a common misconception 
about match play.

Who has the tougher cube decision here?



Hope and Anchor, trailing 2-5, are playing red. A timely 55 followed by a poor 
roll from Trouble and Strife has enabled us to clear our mid-point and get ahead in the 
race. We immediately doubled and sat smirking obnoxiously.

The position is essentially a race – the remaining contact from the 18-point isn’t 
going to make much difference. Working out race equity is hard work when drinking 
beer on a hot day, but an accurate pip count with appropriate adjustments for cross-overs 
and distribution may be plugged into the race equation given in Improve Your 
Backgammon (available at good winebars) for a pretty accurate estimate. Here Snowie 
confirms that Andy and Sue are winning a little less than 23% of the time. So: they’re 
miserable underdogs in the game, they’ve got a 5-2 match lead to protect and the cube 
will be of no future use to them. As Paul Money once commented of some other 
apparently unappealing cube, isn’t this rather like a hitchhiker with halitosis: only to be 
picked up at your peril? More specifically, surely match trailers should generally double 
aggressively and leaders take conservatively, passing up cubes that they would snap up 
for money?

This reason this logic is wrong is that it overlooks a key fact about match scores at 
which one side is two points away from victory and the trailer has little or no gammon 
threat. It is that the extra point the leader can win after accepting the cube at these scores 
is simply enormous, for it takes him straight to the winning post. The leader’s take-points 
at these scores are therefore generally not higher but actually significantly lower than for 
money. (3-away 2-away, with a gammonless take point of around 27%, is the big 
exception, as here a win for the trailer has disproportionate importance, taking him 
straight to the Crawford game.) And here we have a clear case in point. It would be 
merely an error to pass this particular cube for money – but at the score, for Andy and 
Sue to pass would be a monster blunder. It is our double which is marginal. Hope and 
Anchor should be racking their brains, not Trouble and Strife.

But in practice (hot afternoon in the Fox back garden, the befuddling effects of 
Shoreditch stout) it must be right for us to double and it makes psychological sense for us 
to skip the finer points of the maths and reach for the cube right away. There has been a 
sudden reversal of fortune and by doubling we give our opponents the chance to make a 
big mistake. Neither Trouble nor Strife was to be fooled, of course, but they made the 
mistake of rolling rubbish after taking, so Hope and Anchor lived to fight another day.

In the previous game we had trailed 1-5 and were right to resist the temptation to 
cube the following, though we are clearly small favourites, have some gammon chances 
and with a double can render the match-winning gammons of our opponents no better 
than their plain wins:



But the next rolls were 66 for us (good, though pointing rolls are better) and a 
horrible 55 for Andy and Sue, producing this dramatically different board:



Now it’s obviously a huge double and might appear a big pass (Andy and Sue 
didn’t spend too long deciding to give this up). But Snowie rollouts indicate we have in 
fact lucked into a more or less perfectly efficient cube turn: that is to say, our opponent’s 
decision is so close that we shouldn’t actually care whether they take or pass. Although 
the position on the board has little obviously in common with the previous racing 
position, it obligingly provides a variation on the same match score theme. Once again 
our opponents turn out to have winning chances of around 23% (much harder to estimate 
than in the previous example). The reason that the take is now only marginal is that we 
have a modest number of potential gammon wins which would equalize the match score. 
Here, however, the take would be clearer for money, because the taker is winning some 
gammons too, which at the match score are killed by the turn of the cube.

Simon Gasquoine
27 May 2003

by Paul Lamford,  Simon Gasquoine  and Stefanie Rohan