For some time now, I have felt that my opponent's and my opening moves were identical. I shared this view with Walter Montego and he agreed. We decided that I do a test of 150 games to see how often the opening moves were the same, expecting a result of about 10, at odds of 15/1.
Out of the last 153 of my games, 57 had identical opening moves. Surely, this cannot be right; it needs looking into.

Carl: Many thanks for that; I'll watch for the green writing like a hawk.

When a player accepts an invitation, he/she may switch of the auto-pass feature. I think that the inviter needs to be told this, so that the inviter may cancel the game if the inviter wishes to do so.

coan.net: Thank you for that, Coan, very helpful and to the point.

A further pooint I did not mention, is that the top 100 Backgammon players will rarely, if ever, enter a tournament. they might get an opponent rated 500 points below and then might lose - Horrors.

I am playing someone who is rated 180 points below me. If he wins, he gets 12 points; if I win, I get 4 points. So over 10 games, I would need to win 8 games to get 32 points and make a net profit of 8 points. That is just not going to happen against a reasonably skilled player; there is just too much luck in backgammon games. It means that I am virtually forced to play opponents at my current rating and so my choice of opponents is very resricted.
A much more sensible approach would be to have 7/9 range for a difference of 150 rating points and 6/10 difference for all the rest.

grenv: I agree with you; It's just that it takes that much longer to play a 3 point match than a single game - but it is better backgammon. I am reverting to cubed matches.

nabla: A perfect explanation of why cubed matches should be rated more than single games. There is another point. In a single game, a player is not concerned about losing a gammon. Thus, he may pile as many pieces as he can into your home squares, which makes winning quite difficult!!

Vikings: That is interesting, because over at Goldtoken, they do add on extra points, although the basic rating points are lower (2 for a game).

How many extra rating points do we get for winning a cubed match, rather than a straight, uncubed game?

alanback: Threr have been 198 draws so far, .06%. It's a case of the match being so close that neither player wants to risk losing; seems eminently reasonable to me.

In the Cube game, can we offer draws for a single game?

Please let's have it; it would speed up resignations dramatically!! For rating purposes, a doubled win could count as just that - two wins!!

Hear, hear; Atomic Chess is a great variation and Gothic Chess isn't far behind!

Like both your ideas; the 2nd sounds like Three Checks Chess!