Backgammon - tatics or pure luck?

There are not many sports where Denmark can claim to belong to the absolute world elite. But that is the case when it comes to backgammon. Since 1967, a Danish player has won the world championship no less than seven times. Most recently in 2022, when Sander Lylloff won the title in Monte Carlo. Before that, in 2020, the Danish national team won the World Championship final against Greece. This was the third time the title went to Denmark.

Backgammon is one of the oldest games in the world. In fact, some of the oldest backgammon-like games we know of are more than 5,000 years old. There are drawings of board games in hieroglyphics in the pyramids as well as in sacrificial tombs. Backgammon as we know it today was imported from Arabia in the 13th century. For a long time, the game was banned by the church, causing game makers to hide the boards. Perhaps that's why, even today, backgammon games are shaped like small suitcases that can be easily hidden.

Although the two dice ensure a degree of chance in the game, winning requires thought and concentration. The idea that it all comes down to luck and dice rolls is one of the most common misconceptions about backgammon.

To an untrained observer, it often looks like the winner is just fantastically lucky. But the game is essentially about optimizing your moves and placing your pieces on the board so that you can make a good move, no matter how many eyes the dice show on the next roll. But for elite players, it's important to be good at probability calculation, pattern recognition and combinatorics. In fact, for the truly skilled player, the eyes of the dice doesn’t rally matter.