Neil Foston and Phil Cohen took the field at a wet Tesco Bar Hill this morning, to combine coffee with backgammon.

Foston set the tone in the first game, volunteering a shot when bearing off – apparently completely forgetting about the Cohen checker lurking on the bar. Despite being in excess of 500 stupids, the match winning chances lost were only 5% – nowhere near enough for the worst blunder award (I will only be entertaining double digit entries). I got away with it of course and went 2-0 up, but Phil clawed his way back to 2-2.

Next up a nasty 2-4 backgame. Two ill-advised doubles moved the cube to four admist a PR bloodbath. I lost and descended into a minor sulk.

The dice gods were not finished with us yet. A fairly ordinary holding game morphed into a close bear-off with horrible cube decisions for Phil, culminating in this beauty:

XGID=−−−B−A−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−ac−−:1:−1:−1:00:3:6:0:11:10

Phil, red, is on roll holding a 2 cube, and leading 6-3 to 11. For money the race formulas all say redouble/take, and I was dull enough to need several minutes to accept the cube.

Horror of horrors, this is not even an initial double for money. Whenever Phil rolls a one, I get a big redouble – something we both failed to appreciate. In fact after Phil’s 54 I had a monster underdog redouble to 8, despite only having 30% chances. Which, naturally, I missed. But then rolled double three; over the board, this was profoundly welcome. It was the start of things to come as I rolled my way through the rest of the match.

Oct 6th: Neil Foston  11  Phil Cohen  6