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We had a fair turnout for this month’s regular monthly tournament – 13 players. After the blowout attendance at last week’s final qualifier, I wasn’t sure what to expect – only about 7 people registered. But it made for enough people to run a couple of brackets.

In the “A” bracket, first round had Andres over newcomer Hugues (more or less pronounced “Oogh”), Julie over Mark A, Joel over Bodger, and Ed getting the lucky-because-he-was-late bye. Julie went on to win the bracket over Andres, with Ed taking the Consolation bracket.

In the “B” bracket round one had me beating out Jeremy C, Dave over Kyle, and Howard over Tim. Howard won the bracket, with me taking second, and Dave won the consolation bracket.

I managed to record about 2.5 of my matches, so maybe some of it will make it onto YouTube in the coming days/weeks. We shall see.

With today’s event down, we do have an exciting development in the race for Player of the Year – Howard has now edged out Leah! There are still 3 events to go to finish the year (the two Championships and the December regular), so things could shift again, and of course Jim B is right behind them as well. PotY could go to any of the 3, honestly – and Larry D has a shot as well, although he’ll miss the next two events – but that means his total wins-losses can’t drop either…

Player	Tourn’s Attended	Matches Played	Matches Won	Wins-Losses	%
Howard Markowitz	18	52	31	10	59.62%
Leah Nash	5	14	12	10	85.71%
Jim Benson	7	19	14	9	73.68%
Larry Deckel	14	35	21	7	60.00%
Mark Danburg-Wyld	18	51	28	5	54.90%
Jeremy Krieger	5	14	9	4	64.29%
Ed Parecki	8	25	14	3	56.00%
Kyle Petersen	14	41	21	1	51.22%
Joel Nehl	16	42	21	0	50.00%
David Cohen	12	34	17	0	50.00%
Andres Claux	8	22	11	0	50.00%
Nathan Alter	6	18	9	0	50.00%
Mark Arel	12	35	17	-1	48.57%
Jeremy Conant	5	12	5	-2	41.67%
Bodger Millerd	18	47	22	-3	46.81%
Julie Bellman	11	29	13	-3	44.83%
Stephen Hoffman	8	15	6	-3	40.00%
Tim Emineth	17	43	18	-7	41.86%

Here’s a position that came up in my first round match against Jeremy C. I had just gotten extremely lucky – Jeremy rolled 6-6 after I hit him loose in my home board, and then my 4-4 is an excellent return roll!

When you roll doubles, it’s easier than average to make a blunder, because there are so many more options to consider. Here I didn’t think too hard or too long before settling on 8/4 (to cover the blot) 6/2(2) (to make another home board point), and then I paused to consider the last one, settling on 20/16 (to get more contact so I could hoover up more of his blots after he dances again on my much improved home board). This is not bad, only a -0.462 pentablunder. Sigh. The best move, 20/12*/4, is so amazingly better once you see it. But, you have to see it to play it. So, that was my worst move of the afternoon… Still, it is a dice game, so my luck factor helped cover for my poor play in the match (and in my next one too).

Next event will be the Women’s 2025 Championship, coming up on November 30th – see you there!

-Mark

We had a fantastic turnout for our final Championship Qualifier for the year – 20 players! Results were again, ahem, lopsided – 18 players in the Men’s, 2 in the Women’s. So I had everybody play in one big, raucous bracket, same as we did for Qualifier #3. And we came very close to repeating the result of that, having someone qualify for both the Men’s Championship and the Women’s Championship…

Sande’s casual was again happening at the same time, and so the backgammon players outnumbered even the warhammer(?) players. Lucky Lab was a crowded place.

Because of the size of the field, I decreed that we would stick to 5 point matches, in order to prevent the tournament running into the twilight hours. Certain people tried to get us there anyway – I had two matches which took 9 games to resolve. I would like to remind everybody that the doubling cube does exist and is allowed to be used.

Without going through all the details, for the women’s, Julie secured a bye and Paola secured her spot in the championship. For the men’s, Paul secured a bye and Larry got his spot. Our final list of contestants for the championships is:

Women’s: Kashic (defending champion, bye), Julie Bellman (bye), Leah Nash, Paola Nealon, Kathy Beatty

Men’s: Paul Swain (2023 champion, bye), Kyle Peterson, Cam Davis, Mark Danburg-Wyld (tournament director and all-around swell guy), Leah Nash (overachiever), Larry Deckel, Jeremy Conant

Scheduling is being worked out, I hope to get that announced in the coming days.

Here’s a tough position that came up in Julie’s match against Paul. Score is 2-2 in their match to 5, and the standoff has come to a critical point…

Julie correctly noted this was probably the most important move of the match for her. There are really only two candidate plays — 13/6 (and hope you don’t get hit), or 7/5* 7/2 (and hope you don’t get hit). Either way, there’s only one bad number for you on your opponent’s roll, but one move is significantly better than the other. After hitting, you are much less likely to leave a shot on your next roll, assuming that you are missed. 13/6 is a -0.232 blunder!

Julie made the correct move, but unfortunately for her, Paul did roll a 5 on his turn, and went on to win the match. Nonetheless, an exciting match for everyone concerned, except maybe Asell, her dog, who seemed to not understand what was taking so long.

See you all at the next one!

-Mark

We had a nice turnout for this month’s tournament – 14 players, including a couple of new folks and a couple we haven’t seen in a while. We nearly had 15, but one person locked the keys in the car and couldn’t make it…

We had two brackets, one of 6, and one of 8. In a change, I labeled the bracket of people who didn’t enter the side pool the “A” bracket this time. Round 1 had Joel over Chris, Tim over newcomer Steve, and Mark A over newcomer Nate. Tim later played Nate in the consolation bracket, and told me he learned that Nate had found out about the club from one of our Tour of Patio events – 3 years ago. So getting out there does work to recruit new players, eventually. Anyway – eventually Joel won the bracket over Mark A, with Tim taking the Consolation bracket.

In the “B” bracket, round 1 had Howard over Nick, Bodger over Jeremy C (back for his second event in two weeks), Ed over Larry, and me over Kyle. Howard went on to win the bracket, defeating me in the final. Kyle made up for his slow start by winning the Consolation bracket.

Here’s a cube decision from my first game with Kyle – so the score is 0-0 in a match to 5. Kyle threw this cube out there while I was taking a bite of my sandwich, and it gave me something new to chew on…

I had to kind of talk this one out. Kyle does still have two checkers back, and a lot of ground to cover before he gets them around, so it’s not a “too good” kind of situation. But I am on the bar, and Kyle has a lot of rolls that point on my blot in his homeboard. Ultimately, I reasoned that if I had two on the bar, I would clearly pass – and it was reasonably likely that would be the case after his next move, so I should let it go. And that’s correct! XG reckons that I have 28.5% winning chances, which is not so bad. But Kyle has 38% gammon chances, which is a lot. Taking would have been a -0.403 pentablunder.

It was a good day of backgammon. Next regular tournament is scheduled for October 19 – see you there!

-Mark

We had a good turnout for the penultimate qualifier of 2025 – 14 players came to participate in the tournament. There were an additional 8 or so players who were there for Sande’s casual meetup at the same time, and so backgammon definitely took over the space for the day.

Leah & Kashic, by default, took the top spots for the Women’s qualifier. Rather than have them just play each other, I dealt them into the overall bracket, which then played out 3 rounds to determine the finalists; but due to the length of the matches, they did not settle a first/second for the day.

First round had Howard over Dave, Leah over Larry, Pete over Kashic, me over Bodger, Jeremy C (a newcomer) over Tim, Jim over Joel, and Steve over Chris. Second round had Leah over Howard, Pete over Steve, Jeremy over Jim, and I took the bye. I used the break to go hobnob with the casual meetup crew, and play a few games against Mark A, who showed up to play and hang out but wasn’t feeling well enough to compete.

Then the critical round 3, where Jeremy (C not K) took me out to take a spot in the championship off his first tournament appearance! Pretty impressive, really – watch out for this guy!

The other finalist spot came down to Leah versus Pete. Now, neither of them had brought a board, so they started out playing on Tim’s board, since he was taking part in the chouette that broke out after round 1 finished. But then Tim had to leave, and so they finished on my board, since I was done losing by then. I did go ahead and record the second half of their match, but I haven’t transcribed it yet. However, I can tell you that the winner was Leah!

With that, Leah has spots in both the men’s and the women’s championship tournament, which we’ll navigate somehow. There is precedent – in our first ever championship qualifier many years ago now, Molly A won a spot in the men’s championship. Leah has declared that she’s going to win both events and also Player of the Year, so – notice given. She is, in fact, currently leading the race for Player of the Year as well, just ahead of Jim and Howard. Trifecta, anybody?

We will have our normal monthly tournament next weekend, and so I hope to see you all back there again. Until then!

-Mark

We had a nice turnout for today’s Tour of Patios – 15 players came out – although Leah technically arrived too late to play in a tournament, she got into some good chouette action. Congratulations to Joel, Bodger, Larry, Jim, and Pete for winning a bracket each.

Andres decided that bringing just his kids wasn’t enough, and brought his parents as well this time. His mom kicked my butt, winning 5-0 in our match! They are truly a backgammon family to watch out for…

Newcomer Chris did respectably, making it to the final of his bracket, and staying to observe the chouette action afterwards. And he bought one of the t-shirts. Did you know we still have t-shirts available? It’s true, but the stock is beginning to dwindle. Funds from the t-shirt sales go to support the group’s meetup charges and the blog hosting fees, so ask me for one if you don’t already have one…

We have one more Tour event coming up in a couple of weeks, then next month we return to the fall version of our regular tournament series. I got the third championship qualifier onto the calendar as well – the fourth will likely be in November, with the championship ideally in December. So sign up for those!

We had a decent turnout for today’s Tour of Patios – 11 players came out, and we managed to run 4 full 4-person brackets. The pace has been falling off as the summer has progressed – Tour of Patios #1 had 7 full brackets, #2 had 5 full brackets, and now just 4…

I haven’t been keeping up on posting results, so this will actually memorialize the first three events.

Our first event was at Victoria, and we had brackets won by Nathan, Tim, Dave, Leah, Bodger, Howard, and Joel. We had several newcomers/long gap returners – Suzi (who was from out of town), Kyle L, Zach, Pete, Janelle, and Chris, plus a lot of the usual suspects. It was a shockingly cold day for this one, and thank goodness Victoria’s has overhead heaters, although it would have been nice if they had a setting lower than thermonuclear.

The second event was at The Hilt, and we had brackets won by Pete (at his second event…), Bodger (twice!), Joel, and me. Kyle L, Janelle, and Chris made their second (ever or in a long while) appearances as well, plus Noah who hasn’t been in an age. I had copies of my book for sale at this one, and many people picked one up – thank you all. Plus Janelle and Chris bought a t-shirt, which supports the club, and so thank you for that as well.

Today’s event was at Bar Bar, incorrectly labeled as Mississippi Station on meetup. We had brackets won by Julie, Larry, Leah, and Howard. Today’s newcomers were Logan (who picked up a t-shirt as well), and Jeff, who learned about the group from seeing Paul on Jeopardy! Turns out that was some effective advertising for backgammon and our group that Paul did there – everyone should be on notice that any national television time they get I expect you to mention the club if you can. Thank you in advance.

Here’s a position that came up in my match against Julie – you know, the one where she crushed me to win the bracket. Things were going her way, and she rolled well, but felt conflicted about the right move to play.

She was looking at three moves. The first was 13/3, the quiet play. The second was 8/4 8/2, also quiet but also constructive, although it gives up her landing point on her 8 point. And the third was 11/5* 8/4, the bold play. She said she had Howard’s voice in her head, saying “Don’t be scared, don’t be scared”, but also her own voice in her head, saying “Don’t be stupid, don’t be stupid!” Ultimately, she went with one of the quiet plays, which is good, because the bold play is a massive blunder! It never hurts to look at a play, unless you talk yourself into it. Well played, Julie.

Next one will be in just a couple of weeks, August 9th, at The Zipper. See you there!

-Mark

The site was, alas, down for a month or so due to a MySQL migration that I did not plan for, so sorry to all of you who were getting error messages. The big news (in my opinion) while the site was down is – my book is now published! If you haven’t heard, I wrote Rigged Dice: A Backgammon Adventure, along with the companion Solution Manual. Currently, the only two ways to get a copy are:

a) Contact me in person, or

b) Go to Amazon: Rigged Dice and Solution Manual respectively. Amazon knows you want to add both to your cart, so… Go get it!

Welcome to the Portland Backgammon Club. Also known as the Vancouver, Washington Backgammon Club, since I happen to live across the river. Anyhoo: this site is being set up to be the new home for backgammon in the Portland (Oregon) metro area. The intent is to use this website mainly as a place to put out information about tournaments in the Portland area. Depending on how organized this all becomes, it is a central online location for calendars, announcements, etc.

My history: I’ve been in the area for a couple of years, and playing with the Portland meetup.com group. The problems with that are:

1. Many people join it not out of an interest in backgammon per se, but just because they’re signing up for every possible meetup game group. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it doesn’t lend itself to developing a core of local backgammon players.
2. Meetup has an unreasonable pricing structure for groups over 50, when they are mainly an email distribution tool and there are other options.

So. This is a work in progress, but if you’re a backgammon player in the Portland area, stick around. We’ll build something good.

-Mark