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Gary Wong 1998
I don't know if I'm in the minority here, but in my opinion there's no book
so bad I'd advise everybody _not_ to read it. There is no book so bad that it
can't provoke thought in a careful reader -- and I would claim that the thoughts
a book leads you to think about are at least as important as the "facts" you
might learn, which are really only a sort of bottom line. No serious mathematics
student should scan through a textbook memorising the results and throwing away
the proofs -- similarly, with a backgammon book you shouldn't be trying to take
a small sample of the "best" books and copy the style of play their authors
advocate, but reading about the concepts behind what they're writing; emulating
their thought processes perhaps; and most importantly, thinking about the same
concepts yourself and forming your own opinions. I see criticisms of (for
instance) Becker's "Backgammon For Blood" to the point of "if your opponent
mentions having read this book, double immediately" -- I think it would be a
terrible shame if any serious reader were to be put off the book by reading
something like this about it, because they could probably learn a lot by
considering what it has to say beyond face value.
The aim of reading a good
book should not be to learn to play like the author, but to open your eyes to
concepts that they express that you had not experienced yourself. For instance,
timing is a concept that a beginner might find extremely difficult to deduce by
themselves; through trial and error they might notice that in some types of
games, their own position tends to deteriorate faster than their opponents.
However it's something that a book can provide a great deal of insight into,
just by giving the reader another point of view to the same properties they had
already noticed informally in their own games, or perhaps previously been
unaware of but now able to look for. Even if the conclusion the author makes is
blatantly wrong ("when you find yourself short of timing, dump extra chequers
onto your 1 point to avoid leaving blots"), the background is valuable.
I
guess my opinion then is to steal as many ideas as you possibly can about the
game from books; read them critically whether they're Magriel or Becker; form
your own opinions, and never stop thinking. Feel free to disagree with the
author -- whether you just learnt to play this morning, or have beaten Jellyfish
in a 21 point match every day before breakfast for the past year. Try playing
the way the author suggests; try any reasonable alternative you can think of --
see which you prefer.
Perhaps most importantly, don't be afraid of being
"wrong". There are so many ideas in backgammon that it's impossible to be
"right" about all of them anyway. But I guarantee that if you thought about
something as a beginner, make an elementary mistake and then eventually learn
you were wrong all along and then start conforming to generally accepted expert
opinion, then you'll have learnt a lot more than somebody who just accepted the
expert opinion in the first place without challenging it. Don't ever be
embarrassed or afraid to change your mind. I'm no expert and have only been
posting here for a few months, but I bet I could already find a hell of a lot to
argue with against what I've written before. That doesn't worry me one bit (nor
will it make me shut up I'm afraid, you have to killfile me for that :-) And I'm
not the first to change my mind, even the experts have been changing their minds
about backgammon for thousands of years. Since the dawn of history, players have
preferred to split with an opening 21 for instance -- until the modern play of
the 1970s started favouring slotting the 5 point for a stronger offence. And
then after seeing neural nets play differently and beat them, experts have
changed their minds again and decided that gee, maybe splitting was right after
all, these damn computers have made us look a bit silly. But what matters isn't
what play is currently fashionable (or even "right", since nobody can say for
sure) -- the fact is that we now know more about the strengths and weaknesses of
splitting and slotting than anybody ever has before.
GARY WONG
1/20/98
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