Walter, CM100: First off, sorry for missing that bit about the game properties, and thanks for answering it George. (And yes, I analysed it as a single-point match.)

Much of my learning with GnuBg has been of the form: do a move, get told off about it and then, in the absence of any verbal explanation from the program, rationalise the moves that it says are best. Often this is helped by the fact that there will be part of the move which is common in all the top moves, eg getting a backrunner moving or making a point.

That move 6. The best move given by GnuBg was to hit on the 11 as I said. The second was to bounce off the bar to 16 and start getting home. Your move was deemed 5th out of the 6 that were possible. Guessing to the utmost I think there are several factors. Your move hit on the 2-point in your table which is deep. GnuBg doesn't usually care to go deep. And the hit gave no particular advantage given that there were 5 points open. It even thought that simply moving your blot from 10 into 4 would have been better. More importantly, I think, it wasn't comfortable with you having 5 men in my home table. You had anchors on 4 and 5 so one of these is superfluous. the 5-anchor is better, of course, but hitting me on 16 would have started you on the way home and evened the pipcount by 14 reducing my lead to only 10 pips.

Damn right with "Luck beats skill". It takes a lot of skill to overcome a little bad luck and a little luck to beat a lot of skill. ;-) That's very apparent from having watched so many tournaments at VogClub (they're over in a couple of hours). The top players win more often, of course, but they frequently go out to some of the weakest players.

The Backgammon Rating Formula as used by most of the bg sites calculates that top players (2100-2200; the maximum is lower than in the chess system) playing an average player (1500) will actually lose about a third of the individual games played. That indicates how much luck the formula reckons to be in the game.

I think we'd both agree that you won that particular game due to luck. All those hits and me dancing for half the game while you romped 5 men back from my home table without a care in the world?!! Lolol. I was looking forward to a good jousting match between our respective knights but your knights snuck home in the dark of the night while my King was getting drunk.

As for who's better? Time will tell, my friend. You have the lead so far. ;-)

But does this machine know what it's talking about? Well there are certain games plans/styles/situations where it is less accurate than others - mainly because they are less common. Back games and near back games such as ours may well be in that category; certainly it was true in the past, but the databases improve with every release. I don't know enough about that area to state much.

They do play each other. There's a program vs program tournament held every year but attendance is dropping as it's expensive to enter and the existence of GnuBg as a world-class and free program means that revenue has dropped for the professionals.