Who is the best backgammon player in the world

Woolsey is also a world class Bridge player who contributed to the bidding theory of that game with such improvements as the two-way, check-back convention and a defense system against opposing no-trump openings.

In , Woolsey published New Ideas In Backgammon, a book he co-authored with Hal Heinrich of Canada, the World Champion, in which the two experts give valuable insights on a large collection of analyzed positions collected from live backgammon tournaments. Lars Trabolt, Denmark Lars Trabolt is another of backgammon master that have emerged from Denmark, the country which holds the record of having the biggest membership of a national backgammon federation.

At the table, Lars is one of the most serious players you will come across — totally immersed in concentrating to find the best play on every one of his rolls. He is rated 9 on GammonLuck.

He was also in Bristol the year before for an unusual event, a marriage plus backgammon tournament, to celebrate the wedding of his friends Roland Herrera and Simonetta Barone — both being backgammon players as well as musicians.

Leo Fernandez, Argentina Leo Fernandez is the most travelled and most popular of Argentine backgammon players and has an impressive history of money wins at international tournaments all around the world. Fernandez won the Crowns Cup in June of , a unique tournament that was filmed for television in a secret location in Germany. Fifteen other top backgammon players attended, and each was presented as a tough-guy champion accompanied by beautiful women.

There was never any online report about neither this event nor even the results posted anywhere — so who were the others winners? If you wanted to know, you had to see the TV show which was broadcasted in Europe in sixteen minute episodes. His Poker record shows that he also won money in two other events since Malcolm Davis, U. Malcolm Davis is the friendly Giant of Backgammon. Cool, calm and collective, you can always have a very interesting conversation about the game with this veteran player and gentleman.

Davis is a tall Texan who was the American Backgammon Tour Player of the Year and has been voted as a top player in the Giants list for all but one of the polls since His highest ranking was 12 in Davis takes care of vineyards in Texas but has travelled to world events everywhere. He usually brings along his video camera which he learnt to expertly set up on a small tripod next to the board to tape his matches — he later reviews the video and transcribes the dice rolls and moves to a bot on his computer so he can analyze how he played live.

Davis can be seen in a series of videos on ExpertVillage. In a few basic lessons, Davis explains the rules of the game and demonstrates how to set up the board. He also provides some tips on the basic strategy of backgammon.

He also won the International Cup at the International Twin Championships in Las Vegas in , as well as many other side events in his long career. In Monte Carlo, Monaco in , being the gentleman that he is, Malcolm was awarded the prestigious Courtesy Trophy by the organizing committee of the World Backgammon Championship.

Mary Hickey, U. Before becoming the second woman to win the second US Backgammon Open, Mary Hickey did not like to emphasize her being a woman backgammon player.

I gave the game up entirely for many years, and then restarted playing once or twice a month at the end of I gradually added more tournaments to my schedule, and plan to play five or six a year from now on.

I think Carol Joy Cole and me winning the US Backgammon Open may encourage more women players to make a bit more effort to improve, and discard cultural issues that says that playing backgammon is difficult for women than for men. And who knows, as the bias against women fades in backgammon and also the wider world, maybe other forms of hatred, fear, and prejudice will also be recognized as the maladaptive qualities that they are.

Several years ago, Mochy decided to get out to as many live events as possible and is actually the most-travelled of Japanese players. He also won the Second Consolation of the World Backgammon Championship in Monte Carlo, three years before he was awarded world champion. Masayuki trains himself by dedicating a lot of time to studying positions from his matches played live at tournaments as well as on backgammon servers such as Play65, where he also serves as an advisor in detecting backgammon bots.

Mochy has also read practically all of the most important books on the strategy of the game. About two years ago, Mochizuki said that one of his goals in life was to have the lowest Snowie error rate amongst human players in the world. It can now be said that Mochy has achieved his goal since so many Danes play backgammon and are notorious for having very low error rates, as well as because many other top international players attended the Nordic Open.

Matt Cohn-Geier, U. Matt Cohn-Geier is probably the youngest backgammon players to enter the giants list in , and definitely the player with the shortest career.

Matt had started playing backgammon only in ; after only two years he finished second at one of the biggest challenges in American backgammon — the Las Vegas Open.

At the same time, he has been participating in live backgammon tournaments, usually those ran by the ABT. His first major win was at the advanced division 1st consolation at the Midwest Backgammon Championships. Matt also writes a backgammon column in the online magazine GammonVillage. Matvey, which translates to Michael in English, moved from Israel to the USA to study, and in his spare time enjoyed playing chess.

He later began to play backgammon for money on the streets of New York. Matvey began playing on the international circuit back around the late s and encountered success almost immediately. Even when wearing a suit, he will pop on his baseball cap backwards. Falafel is also very funny, especially when talking about backgammon, and comes out with lines that always crack up the crowd.

Michy has started playing backgammon professionally in , and since then he authored at least five backgammon books, won the Riviera Backgammon Championship Last Chance, Cannes Doubles Consultation together with Toyotaka Nakamura , captained the winning Japan team on the Nordic Open Nation Cup.

On the Nordic Open, held beside the publication of the Giants of Backgammon list, Michihito finished fourth the Championship event. Michy was paired against backgammon giant 12 Mortem Holm Lassen at the opening speed gammon 3 match, and lost in all three matches.

Mike Corbett, U. Mike Corbett is a veteran backgammon player who lives in Florida and has been ranked in the top 32 Giants of Backgammon in six of the eight polls conducted since He lives with his long-time companion and backgammon doubles partner Danielle Bastarache. Corbett plays internationally and was one of the 25 Giants that competed in the Atlantis Million event in Mike made it to the fourth round of the Atlantis event by defeating Frank Frigo of the U.

This book, good as it is, is not the best backgammon book ever written. But it might be the most interesting one! He also won the Championship at the 2nd Southern Open held on St. And in , Corbett won the International Cup at the Worldwide Twin Championships in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he also won the Seniors event, and to boot, he and Danielle also took first place in the Doubles competition!

Mike Senkiewicz, U. Michael Senkiewicz is another veteran U. Mike was the 1 Giant of Backgammon in and was voted 2 in two of the other Giants polls over the years.

Morten Holm Lassen, Denmark Morten Holm is one of a small group of great Danish players that first started travelling to backgammon tournaments around the world after the game became very popular in Denmark in the early s and while that group has grown a lot larger since, Morten has been consistent, and has truly made his mark as an exceptional player while gaining a lot of respect in the international backgammon community.

Morten was also featured on television in Season 1 of World Series of Backgammon playing a match at the Riviera Cup against Maria Krancheva, considered by some to be the best female backgammon players in the world. He was also a semifinalist in the Main Championship flight at the World Championship. Nack Ballard, U. Born in Evanston, Illinois in , Nicholas Lee Ballard, more commonly known as Nack Ballard, reigned as the 1 Giant of Backgammon for six years between and Ballard has played and excelled in many other games as well, such as Chess, Scrabble and Go, just to name a few.

With countless victories in many international events the world over, Nack is particularly remembered for winning the Pro Am on three occasions — in , and — once with teammate Harvey Huie and twice with Wayne McClintock.

In January of , some 25 of the 32 Giants of Backgammon played in the player, first-ever million-dollar backgammon tournament organized by Stephen Pearson of Player International and renowned backgammon consultant Michael Strato. Ballard has played in fewer tournaments in recent years as he is writing a series of books, co-authored with backgammon master Paul Weaver, about how to play the first three rolls in backgammon — the first book in the series has been released and is called Backgammon Openings — Book A.

Neil Kazaross, U. Neil Kazaross is a U. Neil has won the annual ABT on three occasions, in , and He is also a radio hobbyist and renowned medium wave DXer. In the past half century, backgammon tournaments—like backgammon itself—have undergone a profound transformation. The game, which has been around in some form since the time of the Pharaohs, is most popular in the Near East, and in the nineteen-twenties it became a popular club game in the West.

In the sixties, the game acquired a certain glamour. Lucille Ball played, and so did Paul Newman. Chess players can visualize what the board might look like twenty moves ahead, but in backgammon the dice offer twenty-one random possibilities at each turn. The game must be encountered frame by frame.

The players at the Mayfair drew up tables: If one checker is twelve slots from another, there are three ways to attack, and an eight-per-cent chance of doing so successfully. They rolled out positions, playing every permutation to identify the best move. Rollouts could take hundreds of hours. By shaving off any trace of error, they could hedge against the chaos of the dice. To the uninitiated, they undoubtedly seemed astoundingly lucky. The Mayfair denizens won a lot of money, until their skill became too conspicuous.

The laborious rollouts were no longer necessary. Many younger players assume that its judgment is close enough to perfect. He reviews thirty a day on his Kindle, as a morning exercise.

Falafel has no patience for memorization. Because he is undisciplined, he regularly makes small mistakes early on, but in the complex middle game—where checkers are spread out in ambiguous arrangements, and the differences between plays can be hard to measure—he excels. I should have bet on Falafel: by the time the main tournament in San Antonio began, he and The Bone had arrived.

Falafel was wearing red Air Jordan sweatpants, a black-and-white plaid shirt, a green hoodie, and his yellow cap. His first opponent was Carter Mattig, a sound engineer from Chicago and a jocular trash-talker. The two men found an empty spot at one of the folding tables that filled the room. When Falafel plays, his manner is casual but focussed—unless he is losing, in which case his head droops as if it were filled with sand, and his body curls over the board.

The play was brisk, and with each move Falafel, like all the Giants, was looking for fractional advantages. For most people, it is difficult to see the difference between a superlative player and a very good one. Later in the tournament, Jeremy Bagai, who is No. As a computer made clear, each move was just marginally better than the one Bagai would have made, but the aggregate effect was undeniable.

Backgammon is a game of nano-distinctions. Falafel beat Mattig, 5—4, and afterward a debate arose over one of his moves: was it mathematically correct, or had luck aided him? The stakes were set at fifty dollars. The position was entered into a computer, and players crowded around the screen. Falafel called Kageyama over, showed him the position, and asked him what he would do.

Falafel was slowly making his way upward in the brackets. He had an easy time against Gary Oleson, a Walgreens pharmacist, who had come dressed in a black nylon shirt featuring a dragon strangling a tiger. While Falafel was up, 2—1, it was announced that the tournament would break for dinner.

He stood and stretched, which emphasized his hemispherical belly. At any given time, Falafel has more bets going than he can keep track of.

He has bet on his abilities at tennis, on his dancing skills, on whether he can win an argument about Islam. When he was thirty-eight, Falafel bet five rubles that he would be married in two years. He lost. In San Antonio, he told Perry Gartner that he had a long-standing bet: for every day he did not have a child before turning fifty he owed someone five dollars.

Gartner, perplexed, asked how that was even a bet. But it is going to happen. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? One night, he and several other backgammon players were crammed into Sushi Saito, a three-star Michelin restaurant that seats only seven people. By then, Falafel, who was enduring a difficult stretch of sports betting, had reached three hundred and ten pounds. Genius, who has a slight frame and is four inches shorter, weighed only a hundred and thirty-eight. The question began to take on the contours of a wager, and the next day a taker emerged willing to give them fifty-to-one odds.

He hustled me into referring to him only as Mr. Joseph—even though anyone on the backgammon circuit will immediately recognize him. He has played Saudi royalty, and he claims to have won as much as three hundred thousand dollars in a match. Now I say I want a million-dollar losing day, which means I am wealthy enough to have a million-dollar winning day. No one involved is keen to see its magnitude documented, so just imagine the contents of a large armored suitcase in a James Bond movie.

Joseph was in San Antonio, too. An enormous man, he was dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts, and, when Falafel and The Bone walked over, he and Genius were playing a variant of backgammon involving only three checkers, for five hundred dollars a point.

The Bone wins. He knows how to win. You find a way to lose to the worst players. Since Sushi Saito, he had lost about sixty pounds, and Genius had gained twenty. Just about any time I ran into Genius, he was eating a J. In , he told another player, Brian Zembic, that he would give him a hundred thousand dollars if he got breast implants and kept them in for a year.

They helped him meet women, and he ended up marrying one of them. A year came and went—and a hundred thousand dollars was wired to a Swiss bank account—but still he kept the implants in. Once, when Falafel came to visit, Zembic unbuttoned his shirt and danced. Falafel smiled and blushed. In his own way, Falafel wanted to be transformed, too. He wanted to be healthier, more mindful, more purposeful. I should have a family. That is a big missing part of my own puzzle. Once, in an airport, Falafel sat next to a rabbi, and asked him for his thoughts about gambling.

The rabbi said that it was not prohibited, but that a life of gambling was unsanctioned by God. Is that it? At the Menger, Mr. Joseph had rented the Presidential Suite, and on Super Bowl Sunday he filled it with food and with backgammon players.

By then, the tournament was over. The mood was relaxed. Falafel had lost in the semifinals, to a longtime player from Texas, and he had been upset. As of p. Tesla Inc. Analysts raise their price targets on Nvidia and reiterate positive ratings ahead of the company's quarterly earnings next week. He exercised 2. Let's go shopping. Rivian's debut in the public markets has investors buying up shares of other EV sector start-ups.

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