Portland Metro Backgammon Club

On January 10th, 2026, 7 people came together to determine the 2025 Portland Metro Backgammon Club’s Men’s Champion. Well, 6 came together, then Paul showed up later, because he had a bye in the first round, having won two qualifiers.

Round 1, Jeremy C faced off against me, Kyle had to take his chances against Leah (who, reminder, is the 2025 Women’s Champion), and Cam had to battle it out against Larry. And I guess Paul had to challenge himself, in some dimension, as well – but he got through that ok. Anyway, in those pairings, the second player was the winner. Leah and I sat down to play our round 2 pairing; while Paul sat and waited for Cam and Larry to finish (they went to 6-6 DMP in the match to 7, really getting as much play as possible out of the match).

I won the first game on a relatively early double/pass. Second game, Leah had me in a rough spot and I unwisely took a cube that was also a pass, and paid dearly for it, losing a gammon to go down 1-4. Third game, the shoe was on the other foot, Leah taking a cube that was technically a “too good/pass”, although she managed to save the gammon. It turned into one of those crazy long games, where she hit a blot during my bearoff, and had to try to contain me from re-entering and running around the board – game had 55 moves before it was finally over. Fourth game, I doubled her from the bar, with two checkers on the bar actually. She took, and it did not go well for me. Soon enough, she redoubled, I took, and she went on to win the game, advancing to the finals!

Meanwhile, Larry and Paul were battling it out. I was too busy to watch their match, but it went Paul’s way in the end.

I did record Leah & Paul’s final, and I will get it up on YouTube eventually – took me a week to get around to doing this write-up, so I’m definitely behind on my work… 🙂

Anyway – first game, Paul won on a relatively early double/pass. Second game, Leah (attempting to recreate her match against me) offered a relatively early cube, which this time was not a double/pass, and so Paul took, and Leah won that to take a 2-1 lead. Third game, Paul came back, getting Leah to take a borderline cube and winning a single: 2-3 Leah-Paul. Game four, Leah got in another cube and won another single, regaining the lead 4-3. Game five, she did the same again, taking it to 6-3 Crawford! Paul, his back to the wall, rallied and took it to 6-4 Post-Crawford. Game seven, Paul won the opening roll, playing down and slot with his 5-1. Leah replied with a 5-2 and so was not able to hit the blot in her homeboard. Paul doubled, of course, and Leah took, of course. And then it was on – Paul playing a gammon-go, Leah a gammon-save game. Paul took an early lead, hitting one of Leah’s checkers to put 3 back into his home board. Leah replied with 1-1, making a four prime and putting Paul on the bar. A few rolls later, Paul got 5-5, letting him escape his back checker and setting him up to have an easy time getting the rest of his checkers home against Leah’s anchor on his 3-point. Leah managed to make Paul’s bar, adding difficulties to his bear-in. But a lucky 4-4 let Paul jump past his bar, and begin bearing off! Leah’s front structure was pretty good, however, and after getting only two checkers off, Paul was forced to leave a shot, which Leah hit! Paul entered soon enough, but was never able to jump back out, and Leah completed the close-out. Leah began her own bear-off, and had to clear both her 5 and 6 point in order to get to having two checker off herself. Paul entered with a 6-2, setting himself up to come back with a big double or two. But it was Leah who scored the next big double, taking four off with her 4-4! Paul limped along around the board, but by the time his last checker was home Leah’s lead was too great to overcome.

Congratulations to Leah, winner of both the 2025 Women’s Championship and 2025 Men’s Championship; and incidentally losing Player of the Year by a technicality – if we had managed to have this event in 2025 she would have had the trifecta! At least she took early lead on 2026 Player of the Year with this 3-0 event. And congratulations to Paul as well for a very well played match – his PR was a “World Class” 4.01 on regular XG settings, probably going down on ++.

Well, that’s a wrap on 2025! We had 12 players come out for our final tournament of the year. I say “final”, but there’s a grey area – the 2025 Men’s Championship has yet to be played, but it is scheduled for January 10th, 2026; so I decided results from that event would count towards the Player of the Year chase for 2026, not 2025.

There were three newcomers at today’s tournament too, Bill, Jeff, and Karen. I slightly rigged the first round of the bracket to make sure they were each playing an experienced tournament player. So, round 1 had Joel playing Bill, Tim playing Jeff, Bodger playing Karen, and Mark A playing Steve H, with the first listed player winning in all cases. Jeff went on to do well in the consolation bracket, though, making it to the final. In the main bracket, Tim ended up winning over Mark A, while Bodger won the consolation.

In the high-rollers bracket, since there were only 4 players, we went with 7 point matches. Round 1, Dave beat me and Howard beat Larry. This was a big deal for Howard, he’s had poor luck against Larry all year. Howard then beat out Dave, and Larry beat Dave as well to take 2nd.

With that, we have a last minute twist in the race for Player of the Year! Leah had it all but locked up, with 12 net wins (that is, 14 wins in 16 matches, so 14 wins minus 2 losses…). Going into today, Howard had 10 net wins. By winning the bracket, he’s tied Leah in net wins! And, in case of a tie, the trophy goes to the player with the higher participation level. Howard got to his 12 net wins over 54 matches for the year – over triple Leah’s count! And so congratulations to Howard Markowitz – Portland Metro Backgammon Club’s Player of the Year for 2025!

Granted, not the greatest honor Howard has ever won in backgammon, it’s still pretty good!

I have set the regular tournament series to continue on the 3rd Sunday of the month through May. There’s a new casual meetup starting on the 3rd Thursday of the month as well, and I will soon be scheduling the 1st 2026 Championship Qualifier as well as bringing back the Portlandia Spring Classic high equity event. So, tons of backgammon planned for 2026. Hope to see you all there!

-Mark

This past Sunday, we had the Women’s Championship. It was a great event, everyone showed up. 🙂 Last year we had a couple of people who were not able to attend at the last minute, and so I was just pleased to have all my contestants make it…

Well, I should say ALMOST everyone – Julie’s friend Kathy, who came from out of town and qualified back in the spring, did not make it; but she was not really expected to.

So we had 4 contestants – Julie, Kashic, Leah, and Paola. After some horsing around for pre-tournament photos, we got them going, in that order: Julie versus Kashic (our 2024 champion, BTW), and Leah versus Paola.

Round 1, I recorded Julie versus Kashic, and I will get that posted to YouTube fairly soon. They had a drawn out battle, and also some controversy! In game 4, holding a 2 cube, Julie decided to redouble from the following position.

The board is shown from Kashic’s perspective. Would you take? Your board is crunched, and you have no landing spot for the back checkers, but you’re winning the race, and if you do manage to pull it off, 4 points wins you the match…

After some thought, Kashic did take the cube – correctly! It’s actually an enormous take, and right on the borderline of a no double for Julie. However, Kashic did not put the cube all the way on her side of the board, she put it closer to the middle; and Julie thought she was rejecting the cube! So Julie started to reset the board, leading to the controversy! The camera doesn’t let you rewind and play back on the device itself, so they had to recreate the position from memory (and came close); but then Julie also gave herself the two points for the drop, leading to further confusion when the game finished…

Fortunately, we got it all sorted out. With some luck and some persistence, Julie managed to unseat our defending champion.

In the mean time, Leah had swept over Paola almost 40 minutes ago. They were hanging out and chatting and generally doing fine; but Leah was eager to get the second match going. After 2 years in a row coming in second, she was out for blood.

Paola stuck around and played a chouette with me and Jeremy (Tim had also come by for a bit but left around this time). I also recorded Leah and Julie’s match, of course, and that too will go up on YouTube as soon as I process it.

But I won’t make you wait to find out the results… Leah started out strong, and came close to sweeping Julie as well. But after winning 4 games straight (for 5 points total), Julie began staging her comeback. She won a point, then another! And then – Leah got her win!

Congrats to Leah, our 2025 Women’s Backgammon Champion! And, with these two match wins, she also is back firmly in the lead for 2025 Player of the Year! With one event to go, three others (Howard, Jim B, and Paul) are within range to overtake her on that one – but they need to make it to the final tournament of the year (December 21st) and get 2-3 net wins to do so. We shall see what happens!

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!