Backgammon Boot Camp Paperback – 1 May 2004

If you are brand new to the game this should not be your first book, but this would make a great second book on backgammon. It is perhaps my favorite backgammon book of all time.

Nearly didn't buy this book because of other negative reviews about it being dated. There are a few plays in there that are but the book highlights this and also tells you the modern bot approach with theory. This makes it even more interesting to see the difference in past and present analysis and how the game has changed.

Absolutely seminal work for the serious backgammon player.

Very detailed explanations but for me whole chunks were incomprehensible because of the maths and probabilities calculations which I simply couldn't follow despite reading several sections several times , and attempting to use a calculator.I also needed google to research some terminology ( VIG , for example) and the use of a slash to mean " divide" and an asterisk for "multiply" thoroughly confused me for a while. Good old google!As I was unable to understand maths post age 11 at school, whole chapters were a blank and the explanations of the calculations of eg cube actions or equity were meaningless or non existant ....Page 235 for example.." if p is the probabilty that A wins, we have : p=11/36+(1-p)x 25/36, which reduces to p=36/61, which is about 59%" . In what language is this? How this calculation and nearly all the many others is worked out is not explained nor could I use a calculator to do it because of the (1-p). How does that fit on a calculator keyboard?So while I can easily recommend this to intermediates and budding advanced players who can get to grips with the maths, it is highly frustrating to have to keep jumping whole sections/chapters because the calculations imply a pretty good knowlege of maths , percentages and probabilities and how these gel together to produce the result.( I needed the working out to be shown and it isn't).I came to hate the word "so" or synonyms just before some magical figure ( which apparently bore some relationship to the line of unexplained gobbledegook which preceeded that dread word)So while it is a mine of other info and just about worth it for that , it is my least favorite backgammon book and the only one I have consistently slammed onto the floor in frustration purely because of the absence of explanation of the maths across whole swathes of the book .