Learning to Roll With It ...

The Backgammon Galaxy "error rating," that is.

As I've noted in the past, their algorithm seems to heavily reward a "land on any blot and hope for the best" approach. People who play like that seem to get a lower "error rating," versus those who carefully marshal their pieces around the board, playing a good defensive game by 1) turning their singles into binaries to protect them from attack and 2) filling their home area with doubles so that an opponent on the bar has trouble getting off.

The effect of that is that if a "land on any blot and hope for the best" player gets lucky and wins, he gains rating points; but if he isn't lucky and loses, it doesn't cost him any rating points because he gets a lower "error" rating than the person who's actually, um, playing backgammon.

For that reason, I've started focusing on win/loss ratios as opposed to ratings points to tell whether I'm playing well and/or whether I'm facing a skilled opponent. I've played opponents with ratings above 2,000 who have won a quarter of their games. For comparison, at the moment, I'm still winning about half of mine and have still won about a third overall since I started playing.

Over the last few days I've changed my approach, though: When I realize I'm playing a "land on any blot and hope for the best" opponent, I simply adopt that approach myself.

I can't say I like those kinds of matches. It's like playing a slot machine instead of, say, Omaha Hi-Lo. It's entirely luck instead of part luck, part skill. One player gets the whirling lights and sirens amdcoins falling into the tray -- WHOOPIE! JACKPOT! -- the other one doesn't. But the loser has a good chance of getting a low "error rating" and not losing ratings points on the game. And it's not like trying to playing skillfully versus such an opponent is much fun even if you win.

Anecdotally, it seems to be having that effect -- I'm getting lower than usual error ratings when I match a "land on any blot and hope for the best" player's approach instead of playing backgammon for real. But it's just not that much fun. Win or lose, I have more fun when I'm up against a player who's actually thinking.