Jakob Garal's Page

Thanks a lot,..regards.

Thanks, I am here to check out the new BEZMA board!

I have several comments about your Fair Backgammon book (been trying to advance some of the issues myself and one even successfully) and the BEZMA board is kinda interesting as well (I was hell bent on designing one myself ages ago but but but time constraints). I could maybe get your email from Jouni Laitila but if you would drop me a line at gv_eskimo AT hotmail.com I'd prefer a faster approach than commenting here.

Like I said I'd prefer to write up things in a direct mail (and I'm not sure if mail@fairbg... actually is read) .

But I'll take the shorter comments one by one here for the time being.

First of all, it's nice to see someone taking a rather scientific approach to some of the problems I've felt unfair as well for, well, about as long as I've been playing in tournaments. Well done. Any critisism below should definitely be seen as constructive :D.

Page 47/48. I feel that knowing the 1st roll of the next game surely could affect your risktaking in the current game. I'd say that's a disadvantage for Option C. Then again, it's still about as fair as it gets so this is just an observation. Still a preferred option for tournaments.

Page 57+. It's probably an understatement to call this complicated. Complicated also means error prone and somewhere else in the book you say that one of the reasons for the current system is simplicity. My immidiate feeling was that for this to be successful tournament "ladders" should be run using computers and if the system can be made "bullet proof", i.e. the tables become about as rock solid as todays match equity tables, people could just trust the software making the calculations.
Maybe I'm just worried that if people don't understand the scoring system without spending hours reading about it (like me and I'm probably still at a loss :), how likely are they to embrace it?

Page 88. At the top you might as well say that "most" players participating in tours never win any significant amounts of money, in any tour. So I certainly agree with you, if you are going to pay for the "fun" you should definitely get more of it.
I started using a Wide Payout system for the Finnish League I was running some years ago. This is too long to dive into here (hence email would be better).

From the previous point we would get into surrendering points which luckily would be somewhat addressed by the Wide Payout so again, I leave it out for

(uh, there is a max comment size or it just doesn't show?)
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now.

Page 76 (roughly). The handling of Byes could be a bit more complicated than expected. At least I wasn't convinced of it being fair by any of the options presented.

I'll also leave out any BEZMA comments as such comments could have commercial value.

Hi Jakob and thanks a lot.

How should I start to play?!!! Can't find!!