Backgammon: Basic Doubling Strategy (Part II)
See also
Taking Doubles.
Assume that you have been doubled. Unless your opponent has made a serious miscalculation, he is the favorite Why, then, should you consider taking at all and playing on at a higher stake?
The answer is that by passing you give up a sure point, whereas by taking you may hope to turn the tide of the game and win two points yourself. Thus, if you have a reasonable chance to win, yon are better off taking than resigning yourself to a sure loss.
What constitutes reasonable? One criterion often used is whether you have better than a 25% chance to win the game. However, except in a few well-defined endgame situations, there is no practical way of evaluating what the true odds of winning actually are.
Every position is different, so there is no easy formula for deciding what your practical chances are in a given position. In tact, many of the world's best players often disagree strongly about the merits of accepting certain doubles.
Gammon Possibilities.
Sometimes your position will rapidly become so overwhelmingly strong that you have virtually no chance of losing and have an excellent chance of gammoning your opponent. In such a case, doubling would be a great error — because your game is too good. If you double, your opponent will quickly pass, giving you half what you would gain if you played the game out and gammoned him.
Gammon possibilities may also strongly influence your decision about whether to accept a double. Consider the case where you have a reasonable chance to win, but sense that you will be gammoned if you lose. In such a case, you must be far more careful in accepting, for you are risking losing not twice as much, but four times as much. (This is one reason why the 25% rule mentioned earlier for taking doubles is not always an adequate criterion).
Conversely, when considering whether to double, if you have a significant chance to gammon your opponent but run little risk of being gammoned yourself, you may consider doubling earlier than usual. The ability to judge when a position involves a possible gammon comes with experience.
In sum, good doubling strategy goes hand in hand with a knowledge of the game — the ability to correctly assess positions and predict the games resolution. As you play more and read further in this book, you will acquire an understanding of the underlying concepts of the game, which in turn will better enable you to assess your overall chances.
