Novice backgammon players are often far too conservative with the cube and doubling and the mathematics of the situation simply do not add up. Let us look at a basic example to show what I mean here. Let us take Fred and John who are identical players who each win 50% of their games against each other. Fred uses excellent doubling strategy because he can better assess when he has the advantage and although John plays his moves identical to Fred, he is grossly inferior with cube strategy.
So Fred wins 50 games out of 100 and so does John. Out of those 50 games, 30 are singles and 20 games are doubles and so John wins 70pts and if they were playing for $1 per point then John’s 50 wins makes him $70. Fred on the other hand doubles at key stages in the game and John makes the mistake of accepting each time. So Fred wins double the money that John wins per game. He wins 30 singles but the dice is on two so he wins $60 in total for those 30 games. His other twenty games are doubles where he earns $4 per game and another $80.
So Fred makes $140 from his 50 victories while John only wins $70. So after 100 games Fred is showing an overall profit by $70 which means that over 100 games he is taking on average $0.70 per game from John. This figure isn’t accurate because John will win some games where Fred has doubled but it highlights the point. This is all despite winning the same number of games. So it is clear then the John has to do two things, he needs to stop accepting doubles in poor situations and make it so that Fred makes less money when he wins and he also needs to punish Fred by doubling the stakes in situations where he has the advantage and where Fred will likely accept the double.
If neither player doubled then no player could gain an edge but this is the power of doubling strategy and a clever and skilful appreciation of the position is what is needed to play backgammon really well.
