Back in Action!

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!

Hello world!

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