Backgammon Tips

Backgammon beginners often tend to lean more on their good fortune than improving their strategy. Any expert would tell you that learning some basic backgammon strategies and following these backgammon tips would be far more affective than clinging into a clover leaf or any other lucky charm.

Count your Pips

Your essential goal in backgammon is to precede your opponent or in backgammon lingo, to be ahead in the race. To achieve this goal you must start counting your pips to estimate the number of pips you'll need to bring your checkers home and bear them off. Counting your pips and learning to use pip count formulas will assist you in making the correct cube decisions.

Make the Right Opening Moves

There are only 15 possible opening rolls in the backgammon game; in each opening roll there's at least one superior opening move, which has been already proved in endless backgammon games to progress the player's game. Therefore, it would be unwise, not to mention extremely arrogant, to trust on your own intuition instead of walking onto that already paved path.

Use the Doubling Cube Wisely

Again, many theories have been written on the doubling cube issue. When to offer a double and when to accept or refuse a double are tough, sometimes even stressful decisions especially for backgammon newbies. A well known and reliable doubling theory is Woolsey's Law, named after backgammon expert Kit Woolsey, which advises you to double, as a rule, every time you are not sure whether it is a take or a pass.

Learn & Practice

The bottom line, if you want to improve your play you must not only practice as much as you can but to also use study tools such as backgammon books and articles. Additionally, save and replay your online backgammon games to learn from your mistakes.