The Language of Backgammon: A Player's Dictionary 

 

$21.50         £14.54          €21.13

 

Once a favorite pastime of thrill-seeking gamblers, backgammon has evolved over the last half century into a true statistical science, with its top players rigorously training with artificial-intelligence programs in their quest to master the game’s secrets.

​

The vocabulary of backgammon has evolved as well. While much of it remains that of a craps player out of a Damon Runyon story, it now also teems with expressions denoting mathematical parameters and techniques that would have left an old-school risk-taker utterly at sea.

​

This dictionary, a companion volume to the author’s The Backgammon Chronicles, captures the language in this transitional phase, preserving its colorful, traditional argot while clearly defining the concepts that enable the modern player to analyze the game with unprecedented depth and accuracy.

 

About the Author

A chess master who collected a PhD in philosophy in his late twenties, Robert Wachtel is a rare breed: an accomplished game player with a helping of literary brains to match his computational brawn. Currently ranked world #11 on the peer-rated survey “The Giants of Backgammon” and Grandmaster 2nd class by the Backgammon Masters Awarding Body (BMAB), Robert has been one of the game’s elite players for the last 40 years. He is the author of two advanced treatises on backgammon endgame play––In the Game Until the End (1993) and In the Game Until the End Volume II (2014), and an acclaimed collection of online and journal articles that wittily describe  the evolution of modern backgammon from the early 1990s to the present day. Robert was the editor of the US Backgammon Federation’s flagship magazine, PrimeTime Backgammon, from 2011 to 2019. He is also the author of The Language of Backgammon: A Player’s Dictionary, a companion volume to The Backgammon Chronicles.

​