Backgammon Opening Rolls

In this article and a few to follow we are going to go back to the fundamentals of backgammon and examine how to play the Backgammon opening rolls. As with other games of skill, the opening roll goes a long way towards shaping the game that will follow.

Just like with other games, in backgammon we will see that certain opening rolls can be played aggressively or played passively. The opening roll that you decide to play will depend on the current game situation.

Before we can discuss the different types of opening rolls we must first consider the main objective of the game. Basically, backgammon is a race for home, however, if that was the point of the game then nobody would play it. Even if in the end the race will decide the winner there are many other issues and strategies within the game. To get ahead in the game, we need to create safe landing spots for our checkers, i.e. make points. Another major objective of the game is to hold back your opponent as much as you can. The ideal thing to do would be to trap one or more of his checkers behind a strong blockade. This is called a prime. A prime is a set of contiguous points, where the ultimate is a full prime – six points in a row. While a six-point prime would be ideal, five-point and four-point primes are also very strong.

So our basic goals at the beginning of the game are to create new points – preferably natural numbers (6-1,4-2,5-3) that easily form part of a prime and to begin a race for home. When starting the race for home, the most difficult checkers to get home are the two furthest away at the start of the game, i.e. the two checkers on our opponent’s ace-point. Because of this, it would be highly in our favor to move those checkers in the opening roll, the two checkers on the ace-point. Another important objective is to unstack our heavy points. During the inital set-up, we position 5 checkers on our mid-point (13-pt) and our 6-pt. Five checkers on a single point does not help us in any way so we want to spread and use those checkers as quickly as we can.

36 rolls of the two dice are possible. Each number combination can occur twice, except doubles. For example, 62 can be thrown as a 6 on the first dice and a 2 on the second dice or as a 2 on the first dice and a 6 on the second dice. Excluding the doubles – as those can never be an opening roll – then there are actually only 15 rolls to consider. These 15 opening rolls are put into four groups:

Rolls that are always played the same (5): 31, 42, 53, 61, 65 Rolls on which there is a consensus (2): 62, 63 Slot or split rolls (3): 21, 41, 51 Rolls that are debated: 32, 43, 52, 54, 64

If you think about it, it is quite shocking that after 3,000 years of play some of the opening rolls are still under dispute!

In the next page of this article we will describe specific Backgammon Opening Rolls and how to play them.

Please click here to move to Part two of our Backgammon Opening Rolls article.

Altervativley you can go back to our main Backgammon Strategy page.