Good backgammon books

[SuperUberBob]

Not sure if this should go here or OGG, but this is "Books and Publications". Plus, I think I'll get better responses here.

Anyways, I'm pretty burnt out on poker as of late. Just getting bored with it. So, I have decided to pursue a different game. I used to be a good chess player, but never read the books or got into it like that (mainly because I was in high school).

I decided to give backgammon a serious try and I would like to know what books are pretty good out there. I know of the obvious books by Magriel and Bill Robertie, but are there better books out there. Or are Robertie's and Magriel's books the best available?

[Wolf44]

I used to play backgammon professionally online before I turned to poker. Just had a talk with my old "mentor", his hourly wage is about 6-7 dollars at the moment, but he plays on the nittiest site on the net (truemoneygames.com)

Some parts of Magriel s book are quite outdated, same goes for the early works by Robertie. If you are going to get these make sure you buy "Classic Backgammon revisited" by Jeremy Bagai. This book corrects the blunders of Advanced Backgammon 1+2, Magriels book and others

Really get:
Backgammon Boot Camp by Walther Trice
Boards, Blots and Double Shots by Norm Wiggins
New Ideas in Backgammon by Hal Heinrich & Kit Woolsey
Understanding Backgammon by Tami Jones & Kit Woolsey
501 Essential Backgammon Problems by Bill Robertie
Modern Backgammon by Bill Robertie
Backgammon Encyclopeadia Vol 1 by Kit Woolsey (there is no Vol 2 as far as i know)

This is what really helped me four or five years ago, don t know if anything useful has been published since.

If haven t gotten it yet, you should download GNU backgammon or buy snowie4

hope this helps

wolf

[SuperUberBob]

Thanks wolf [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

So, most of Robertie's and Magriel's books aren't worth spending money on? Surprising since they seemed to be highly respected.

[Wolf44]

You can certainly buy these books, only some parts are outdated - they were published before the neural nets softwares came out, these programs discovered some flaws in these works. But Jeremy Bagai did a great job correcting them in "Classic Backgammon revisited", so make sure you get this book as well.

wolf

[SuperUberBob]

[ QUOTE ]
You can certainly buy these books, only some parts are outdated - they were published before the neural nets softwares came out, these programs discovered some flaws in these works. But Jeremy Bagai did a great job correcting them in "Classic Backgammon revisited", so make sure you get this book as well.

wolf

[/ QUOTE ]

I ordered Backgammon Boot Camp and 501 Essential Backgammon Problems online. Prob get them at latest next Monday.

Also got a backgammon set.

[RobertC]

The books listed by Wolf are excellent. I especially like Backgammon Boot Camp and Modern Backgammon.

I would also highly recommend Backgammon Praxis by Marty Storer. This is a two-volume set of matches of Malcolm Davis. There is commentary from the author, from Malcolm and his opponent, along with Snowie analysis. You will definitely learn a lot from these matches.

And by all means practice against a good bot like Snowie or GNU.

[Wolf44]

[ QUOTE ]
I especially like Backgammon Boot Camp and Modern Backgammon.

[/ QUOTE ]

these were also my favourites [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[ QUOTE ]


And by all means practice against a good bot like Snowie or GNU.

[/ QUOTE ]

absolutely! - snowie costs 350$ if i remember correctly, but GNU is free (www.gnubg.org/). online professionals (a dying breed, almost all do poker now) usually use snowie, because their player manager is excellent and very easy to use. maybe gnu has also good player manager, but i haven t worked with gnu that much.


good luck

wolf