A week at the World Backgammon Championship

Most people will know that there are no rivers in Monaco.

The one I found there is the metaphorical waterway used by poker player and professional pollster Nate Silver to describe an ecosystem of people and ideas focused on probabilistic thinking and calculated risk-taking. The term is derived from poker, where the last community card to be revealed in a game of “Texas Hold ’Em” is known as the River.

Poker players paddle about in the river, but so do stock-market traders, venture capitalists and anyone else consistently taking calculated risks. A politician deciding how to respond to Covid or a foreign invasion is “in the river.” In the broadest sense, we all live in it as we make risky decisions in an uncertain world, tipping our hats to Heraclitus from time to time.

This brings me to backgammon, which is one of the oldest board games known to man, with a five-thousand-year history dating back to ancient Mesopotamia.

Backgammon, a board game that combines strategy and luck, is what brought me to Monaco in the first place. It’s the quintessential river game; you don’t know from moment to moment whether you’ll be ankle-deep or treading water. Backgammon may be a game of perfect information — players can see all the pieces — with no real scope for bluffing, but chance isn’t entirely eliminated.

The aim of the game is to move your fifteen checkers around the board and bear them off (remove them from the board), before your opponent does. The skill comes in choosing the optimal moves based on the potential results of the rolls of your dice and anticipating your opponent’s moves. Players have the option to double the stakes when they have an advantage, which requires further skill in evaluating their positions.

Backgammon is extremely complex (there are thousands of potential positions even after two rolls of the dice); even the top grandmasters are far from perfect. But human players have improved drastically over time: an expert player today is a better player than the top grandmaster from the 1980s.

Still, the game was “solved” in the early 1990s — a computer can play at a level that human players can’t beat. This has an important implication — there is no market to play backgammon online for money; anyone who uses a computer to cheat would eventually win. This is quite different from poker, which has not been “solved” in the same sense. Poker strategy has evolved because of computers, and though they can help, they cannot guarantee winning, so online play remains a huge market for poker.

This factor is probably the most important in explaining diverging trends in the games’ popularity. Poker’s popularity exploded in 2003 after Chris Moneymaker won $2.5 million in the Poker World Series after qualifying for an online event for $40. The number of players in the main event trebled from 800 to 2,600 the following year and stands at over 10,000 in 2024.

Backgammon’s popularity, on the other hand, peaked in the 1980s. Only 300 players entered the World Championship in 2024 — and I was one of them.

The World Backgammon Championship started in Las Vegas, moved to the Bahamas and has been held in Monaco since 1979. The tournament lasts six days and is unusual for the considerable length of its matches (which average about two and a half hours with breaks) and the prestige which comes with its title, which in turn means that it attracts most of the game’s top players.

I entered the fifty-fifth World Championship with my eyes wide open. As a merely competent player, I knew I was at a disadvantage against the professionals and veterans. The entry fee is €1,250, but the total cost ends up being much higher because staying in Monaco isn’t cheap.

The tournament is held at the Fairmont, a dated hotel best-known as the site of the Formula One track’s famous hairpin, and just below the Monte Carlo Casino, the oldest casino in the world. Players are offered a discount to stay in the hotel, with its unassuming bar where a beer costs €17.

Staking €1,250 at odds of about +20000, as an underdog, is not obviously an everyday bet. But I viewed it as an investment: if, say, I improved over time and played the tournament for another thirty years, my chances of eventually being world champion would be about 14 percent (0.5 percent chance of winning over thirty attempts = 14 percent winning chances). That is a better shot than in any other field I can think of. The player population was about 90 percent male but diverse in nationality and appearance. Some chose to dress formally (one American was wearing black tie) but the vast majority were wearing shorts and flip-flops, in part due to the 95-degree heat. A top young Czech player by the name of “Zizi” played in swimming trunks, brightly colored basketball shoes and a bucket hat. It’s common to find out that a man in flip-flops was an ex-world champion or grandmaster and watch him roll out a bundle of notes for a high-stakes cash game. And you can’t miss players like Antoinette-Marie Williams, of New York — “Lady Fabulous” — who zooms around the floor in her “Ferrari,” a crimson mobility scooter. Antoinette-Marie has played in the championship more than thirty-eight times and is an advocate for teaching the game in public schools and community centers.

When I began to play, my heart rate was elevated because of the general excitement, and it was hard to concentrate because of the noise — 100 tables-worth of players shaking and rolling dice at the same time felt like being in the nest of a giant rattlesnake.

I won my first two matches against German and Danish opponents in games that took close to four hours. In my third, I lost to a quiet but aggressive player who said he was from San Francisco even though he had dice with “Moscow Backgammon Federation” stamped on them.

In my fourth game, I faced an Israeli player in what turned out to be a tense and gripping match. So tense, in fact, that my opponent resorted to sucking animatedly on an unlit cigarette. I had led for most of the match but found myself 8-10 down in a match to 11.

In that game, I fell into a weak position where I was down to only a 15 percent chance of winning despite feeling like I had played well. In a remarkable turn, my opponent threw his worst number (6-5), a 6 percent probability exposing two checkers and giving me a 67 percent chance to win. I missed both shots and one after, losing the game.

That rollercoaster experience is typical in backgammon. I had been very lucky to get the shot and then unlucky to miss it. Importantly, I had played the position correctly (I checked later using a computer) and so I could walk away knowing that it was probably a fair outcome. This is why I am drawn to backgammon — and wouldn’t be surprised if it had its own “moneymaker” moment in coming years.

Applying machine-learning analysis to backgammon has enabled players to distinguish between the roles of luck and skill in determining match outcomes. In Monaco it was common to see matches being recorded with a GoPro. This lets players analyze their matches later to learn from their mistakes. Who wins is important, but how a game is won is a paramount consideration in determining how a player will do in the long term.

In that sense, playing backgammon today repeatedly teaches that you cannot judge an in-game decision based on its outcome and that you shouldn’t rue misfortune or celebrate good luck, but recognize each for what it is.

I find that constant reinforcement very useful in approaching life — another game of skill and luck, yet one where it is very difficult to distinguish between the two, even in retrospect.

So I don’t think my bet was so irrational after all. After reeling in the lessons of this expedition, I’ll be back to the river in Monaco again, maybe with a bucket hat and GoPro next time.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2025 World edition.