Bearing Off in the Game of Backgammon

Video Transcript

Hi! I am Grady Johnson and I am a competition backgammon player and today I am representing expertvillage.com. Now I would like to talk a little bit about bearing off. We had a really aggressive game here. I have knocked him back, he has knocked me back and here at the end, I am in a position that I like. I have him up on the bar and I have got all of my stones in blockade positions all the way across the board. Now he is stuck there and cannot even take a turn because I have these all covered and I am ready to bear off my stones. Now the reason I am ready to bear off the stones is I have managed to bring them all the way around the board and get all of my stones together in the board at once. Now I need to bear these off in such a way that I do not take the risk of creating a block where he can knock me back. In a way I would be better off if he was not up here because if he does come down and hit me then I got to go all the way back to the beginning and then come back and that is pretty much the only shot he has got at this point. Otherwise it is pretty much just a race. So I am going to roll here, now we have rolled a six and a five. That is an interesting roll. Now of course we could move off the six and we could move off the five but that is not really to our advantage. I think we know that would create a blot. Now a blot would open us up to attack and we certainly do not want to do that. So what we are going to do instead is we are going to go ahead and get this six off there that is good, but let us go ahead and move one of our sixes over to the five slot keeping everything blocked that means I will get another free roll. You have actually rolled the best roll you can get at this particular point of the game, which are double sixes. Now double sixes are to your advantage because you are able to move four sixes. So the sixes do come off opening up the sixes and you will actually be able to take off the fives as well. The reason for that is that now you have eliminated the larger numbers of your stones, you take the next largest number down when you have additional rolls. Now at this point if you playing in a money game or a point game, this is where you might want to double because you are in a great position where you are going to move forward, your opponent probably just going ahead in full.

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