There is an old saying in poker and it is that “why do the pushing when the donkey will do the pulling”. The meaning behind this statement is that weak players will beat themselves and this applies to any sport or game. It certainly applies to Chess where simply moving your pieces around and placing them into semi-threatening positions can be enough to beat a novice.
In backgammon then weak players will tend to beat themselves by their own weak strategies. By this I am referring to either leaving shots when they don’t need to simply because they have missed obvious moves, not realising strategic concepts or simply not allowing their position to have fluidity. This is the biggest error committed by a novice where many believe that leaving shots is not the correct thing to do.
So novice players basically defeat themselves and you can often build up a dominant position by around the 7th-8th role. However there is luck in backgammon and any player however poor can win games. Novices also fail to capitalise on their equity when they have it and also take poor doubles. You do not need to play a world class game to beat them and in fact doing so could be counter-productive if in doing so it allows the novice counter-play. This in principle is a bit like trying to bluff weak poker players who are calling stations. If they are going to call you down simply because they see a pair and think that it is strong then your complex play has done nothing more than make them inadvertently make the correct play.
