grenv: When I returned to Backgammon a couple of years ago I wanted to concentrate on chequer play. The cube was a complication that I didn't need - in fact, couldn't handle. I was playing a very aggressive robot and, almost invariably, accepting a cube meant that I'd lose even much of the 25-30% that were "supposed" to go my way. I just wasn't good enough at that point. Eventually (after about a year, I'd guess) I got to a very good rating and decided to add the cube. Naturally my rating plummetted as I was offering bad cubes and taking huge drops. So then came the second learning curve and ratings climb. In fact I've only recently got to the top of the list against that particular bot. (It's a GnuBg a couple of versions old and with a voracious appetite for blots and a love of blitzes and primes.)

Now I can't speak for Walter, and he's a much better player than I was when I first came back to the game, but I think doing it in stages is a good idea. Polish your chequer play, which means gammons, and then learn the cube. BrainKing's missing that middle stage, ie. multi-game matches with gammons. Perhaps N-wins matches could be just a collection of single games and N-point matches could include gammons.