Backgammon - Skilled game?

Is backgammon a game of skill or chance?

Since you roll dice, backgammon can be seen as a game of pure luck. But as most experts will easily point out, even after rolling you may have as many as 30 or more options! The decision where to move your checkers after the dice have been cast - that is the essence of the game. Chance is not a material factor.

If backgammon were only a game of chance, players would only be expected to win on average just half of their games. As you may have found out by now, skilled players constantly win games against "beginners". There is so much more to backgammon than just rolling the dice and unthinkingly moving your checkers around the board.

Ever since online games reached the Internet, many aficionados wondered "what will be the next poker?" What other skill betting game could possibly imitate the widespread interest that poker holds? The answer is clearly online backgammon, given that many of the skills and challenges that make poker popular do carry over to backgammon. Not surprisingly then, online backgammon games for money are readily available. Like poker, backgammon can be played a straightforward, unsophisticated way: roll the dice, move the checkers. But there are levels of skill that can be striped back to expose a much deeper, more intricate game.

Since both you and your opponent have the same goal in backgammon, and you both try to avoid getting your checkers knocked off to the bar, what you have when you look beyond the roll of the dice is a game of skill. Backgammon is all about risk versus reward, caution versus aggression. You also have random luck involved, because no matter how skillful an opponent, any player can beat him simply from the random coincidence of a series of unlucky rolls of the dice.

But in the long run, skillfully analyzing the backgammon board and your opponent's ability and game strategy will have a far greater impact than pure luck.

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