From his Eyrie north of the border, Mike has picked up two more wins in Division 6:

Apr 26th: Mike Ireland 11 Charles Pickard 4
Apr 27th: Mike Ireland 11 Becca Bell 9

He also sportingly pointed out that Chas played with better PR and Becca was unlucky not to win from 9-9. But, them’s the breaks, it’s backgammon!

Elsewhere Peter and Maria got Division 5 off the blocks…

Apr 25th: Peter Booth 11 Maria Ferguson 6

…Duncan qualified for the last 16 of the Championship at Mark’s expense…

Apr 27th: Duncan Conway 11 Mark Williams 2

…lastly the Premierhsip got underway with a match of ridiculous swings that would’ve had the tin hat brigade up in arms!

Apr 27th: Neil Foston 11 Michael Skinner 9

The masterpiece of this match was a long, long backgame early doors in which neither player distinguished themselves. It ended with this tricky doubling decision:

The score is important here – I was 4-1 down.

“Please don’t make me double this!” I howled internally, and after interminable wrangling (Michael was very patient), I did the deed.

After the fact it’s a lot less tricky, I have 6 doubles and win over a third of the remaining 30 rolls, making 16-17/36, forty something %, at any rate. At this stage you can probably just ship it; trailing in the match you usually have an underdog redouble when the cube’s this high. I felt obliged to do the sums and got it wrong, but not wrong enough (XG says the raw double point is around 33%, I thought is was more like 38%). Not doubling would be well over 200 stupids and 6% match chances.

Naturally, backgammon being horribly unfair, I then rolled double one :).