#Your own games are the best teacher
Books and lessons teach positions somebody else chose. Your own matches show the positions you actually get and the mistakes you actually make, and most players make the same few mistakes over and over. Finding those is the quickest way to improve, and it used to be the hard part: you had to notice a mistake before you could look it up.
A backgammon engine does the noticing. It replays every decision of a match, works out the best play in each, and tells you what your play cost against it. The strongest engines play far better than any human, so what they flag is, almost always, a real mistake.
#A routine that works
- Play a match, online, against a friend or against the engine.
- Analyse the whole match. In HedgeHog, open Analyze, load the match or import it from another program, and run the analysis on your own device, free and with no account.
- Look at the largest errors first, not the move list from the top. A few blunders usually cost more than every small inaccuracy together.
- Work out why the better play is better before moving on. Set the position up in Study, play both moves forward, and roll the dice a few times from each.
- Write the mistake down in a sentence, as a rule you can use next time: "I slotted when I should have split", "I passed a take in a race".
The last step is the one people skip, and it is the one that makes the next match better.
How to run an analysis, and which files import, is in Analysing a match; how to read its numbers is in Reading the analysis.
#Fix the costliest mistakes first
Not every mistake is worth the same study time:
- Cube errors are worth more than checker errors. A wrong pass or a missed double changes the value of the whole game, while most checker errors cost a few hundredths of a point. If your analysis shows cube errors, start there, with The doubling cube.
- Repeated errors are worth more than one-offs. A mistake you make in every match is a habit, and fixing one habit moves your accuracy more than any single position.
- The opening comes up in every game. Fifteen rolls cover the first move of every game you will ever play, and Opening moves has each one worked out by rollout.
#Measure your progress
HedgeHog scores every analysed match for accuracy: how often you got a decision right, with big mistakes weighted heavily. It is the number to follow. If you want to compare with a PR from eXtreme Gammon, the analysis also reports XR on the same scale; see what a good PR is and Accuracy versus PR.
A single match is a noisy measure, because some matches are full of difficult positions and some are not. Look at the trend over ten or twenty matches, and compare numbers only when they were measured by the same engine at the same depth.
#Learn the tools of the trade
A few pieces of knowledge pay off in almost every game:
- Counting the pips. Knowing who leads the race, and by how much, is the starting point of every race decision and every cube decision. See Backgammon strategy basics.
- The take point. A position is a take when you win about a quarter of the time in a money game, and the match score moves that number. The match equity table calculates it at any score.
- The odds of a shot. How likely a blot is to be hit, from any distance, is in the table in Backgammon strategy basics.
#Get feedback while you play
Analysis after the match is the most thorough way to learn, but it is not the only one. While you play against the engine, the Tutor can warn you before you commit a move that the engine rates as a mistake. And a match saved to your account can be shared with a coach or a stronger friend, who can leave notes on the moves that matter: see Sharing a match with a coach.
#Start now
Analyse a match you have already played, or play one against the engine first. Both run in your browser, for free.