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The Fairmont Grand Hotel and Casino perches on the point of Monte
Carlo which separates the port from the bay of Monaco. In the
Salle’d’Or strange pursuits are underway. Three hundred acolytes
of fate and statistics are gathered to see who is the greatest,
and they are putting their money where their dice roll. The
thirty-fourth World Backgammon Championship is underway and after
a month of half-hearted practice, I have come to test my mettle.
For one thousand euros you can enter the main draw and pit
yourself against the best. Four hundred euros lets you compete
intermediately, and I will part with two hundred to see if I am
the best beginner there ever was.
I learnt to play backgammon with an old friend in the bleak winter
following the death of my father. We were house sitting at the
beach and each night we would sit by the fire, open a bottle of
red and try to remember how to set the board. Waves broke in the
dark as our play slowly developed; we discovered new tactics and
saw how the dice made mockery of our intuitions.
Then I left for Africa to teach and travel with another friend. On
the first hungover morning in Zanzibar I bet John I could come
back with backgammon and set off to find it. The artists selling
paintings on the beach marveled over my shoulder as I painted a
board in red and black. I still have it, and the bottle caps we
used to people it: fifteen blue Safari and fifteen golden
Kilimanjaro. We drank these same beers and played match after
match, grinning in the sunset as the endless scrub rolled by and
the main trunk line crawled toward Lake Tanganyika. In the
Serengeti we made an inflatable origami doubling cube and at
Lalibela in Ethiopia we carved fresh dice out of sandalwood. After
six months I won by two.
And then no play for two years, but this year I found myself
living in Istanbul, arguably the world’s backgammon capital. Tavla
is played everywhere and to distraction. The game has some five
thousand years of history in this part of the world; sets of
proto-gammon dubbed “The Royal game of Ur” have been uncovered in
Mesopotamian tombs. The Turks play fast and furious, every move
accompanied with a resounding clack of checkers. I had regular
games with all my neighbourhood familiars; Kenan the kebab man,
American Jan, Bayram from the carpet shop and Zulkuf the Kurd who
Stood on the Corner. I lost a lot. In fact, I won twice. Upon
learning that the World Championships were held every year in
Monaco I decided that I was perfectly qualified for the beginner’s
draw. On a whim I rolled the dice and booked a ticket.
The Fairmont just pulls off its refined brutalism, though one
suspects that decades to come may not be so kind. But inside the
marbled corridors give cool assurance and glass walls furnish the
illusion of floating above the sea, and a chance to see the gin
palaces scythe into port. The championship was born in the
high-flying, jet-setting days of old money. In the sixties an
exiled White Russian by the fantastic name of Prince Alexis
Obolensky brought backgammon to high society New York and began
the first world tournaments. Backgammon was a game of the elite,
big money games were held in private salons where champagne and
cigars marked late hours. By the seventies stars were playing at
Pips Club in L.A. and Hugh Heffner was inviting the best players
to that mansion to launch the Playboy Book of Backgammon. Clubs
and tournaments sprang up all over the world and the two biggest
tournaments were fused into the World Championships in Monaco. In
the eighties it dropped in aristocratic appeal and gave way to
video games. But in the nineties the game bounced back due to its
easy translation to online play and new software which changed the
way players learn and play. Backgammon is back, but not so sexy.
The board is set for the revenge of the nerds.
This move to analytics and online betting mean that it is now
possible to be a professional player, and there is still a lot of
attitude at the tables. I’m soon learning that the most common
tale in backgammon is of woe and the one that got away. In this
game you can play well, in fact be a lot better than your
opponent, and still lose. The dice are the dice and that is why
the combination of skill and luck is so appealing. In Western
backgammon a doubling cube is also used and is vital to strategy.
This gives a player the option to double the value of the game,
and the other the option to decline and lose or play for double,
holding the cube should they wish to double back.
My first opponent is Silvia Pasquanol, a fifty-one year old
pharmacist from Venice. Neither of us is used to competition
matches and we continually forget to pick up our freshly purchased
precision dice. My games take on a traditional blocking format
while pros react more to the situation at hand, taking on risks as
opponents, match-score and dice decree. We comment on each other’s
moves, quickly reduced to pulling faces and saying by turns, “Agressivo!....
Prudente.” Silvia is out to a brisk lead and clearly knows how to
use the doubling cube – I simply accept and double my losses. The
fight back is long and tedious (for Silvia) but I manage to scrape
back to what I record as seven to eight. I win the next game with
a cube on the table – two points mean victory and those watching
congratulate me. Silvia is confused but tired and leaves quickly.
My new groupies congratulate me, though it turns out they have not
been watching my scintillating play - one of them is salivating at
the thought of playing me next. But I discover there was a mistake
on my card, and track down Silvia to arrange a decider at
eight-all tomorrow. She wins easily and I am one of the few
gamblers whose bad luck story is to arrange to be beaten outside
extra time. To be fair, as it stood I had simply bored her into
submission - a tactic I will refine throughout the tournament.
The enormous spread and history of backgammon mean that in one
week I hear a smorgasbord of strange stories. There is Najib the
giant Afghan whose fat fingers flash the checkers with such speed
and delicacy. Rumour has it he made a fortune in the rebuilding of
Kabul and is fond of ten thousand euro side bets. There are Greeks
who continuously smoke unlit cigars. Arno from Finland has had a
stroke and Antoinette from New York suffers from MS, but dismiss
their games to your peril. Savio of Brazil uses the break to
stride the hall hooting, yelling and slapping his face. There are
students, professors, businessmen and shysters. I have a drink
with hyperactive Shahab, from Iran by way of refugee status in
Norway, who escaped across the mountains of Kurdistan before
traveling to Ankara dressed as a woman. He plays online, but will
fly anywhere to play a ‘fish’, a rich player who wants to try his
luck. Grown men and natural mathematicians are shaking their dice
for that special roll. The cup moves from hand to hand,
invocations are made in divers tongues and dice released with a
final flourish. But the stats are king – and if you know the odds
and the frequencies, you have a huge advantage. And with the
advent of dedicated software you can play the ‘bots’ and learn to
make the right move in every given situation, though you can never
predict the dice.
Masayuki Mochizuki is one of Japan’s new breed; thirty years old,
raised on probabilities and analysis. ‘Mochy’ moves his slight
frame fast, efficiently; his hands have a robotic, insect-like
fluency. Yet he will sit and count and think for a minute at a
time. In the quarter final he is up against the grizzled Israeli
Shimon Kagan, who chews his tongue and covets the board like a
child playing general. A round earlier I spoke to Shimon during
the break in a tight match before he reversed a substantial
deficit to win. Afterwards he says to me – “You are lucky! You
will eat with me.” I am in no position to turn down a free meal in
Monaco and over dinner I ask him, a civil engineer and veteran of
two wars, if he believes in luck. The answer is immediate – “Of
course! Why not?” Every little helps, or perhaps Shimon means that
if he believes in luck, it will repay the favour. But luck cannot
carry the day against the wunderkind from Japan. Shimon falls
behind and must double to make up lost ground. He does and so
nearly carries the day, rolling three consecutive doubles before
losing on the final roll. The robot marches on.
My next match is against another woman in her fifties, Joan
Grunwald from the suburbs of New Jersey. Her husband is a good
player and she has drifted into playing herself. She duly hands me
a lesson in using the doubling cube and walks away with an easy
win. She is smart and apologetic and can’t help but mother me with
suggestions and points of etiquette. The next evening she brings
me herbal tea. Competition and money games continue late into the
night, sitting for hours is part of the gamblers’ machismo which
permeates the room. Crowds gather at complex or tense games, their
silence punctuated by tuts and gasps at risky moves or great dice.
At one in the morning the atmosphere in some games is slightly
manic and things won’t finish here until four. The room takes on
the strange, soft lighting of a world within a world and games
seem to progress as they will. Everything is deep red and gold and
even loud sounds seem muted, though always there is the rattle of
dice in the shakers. Crossing the floor, I bump into the lumbering
‘Falafel’. Michael Natanzon is a larger than life American Israeli
who is ranked World No.1 by his peers, though backgammon can be
fickle, as Falafel has bombed in all draws at these champs. We
have much in common. But money games are his specialty, as you’d
expect from someone who cut his teeth hustling small stakes in
Central Park, and Falafel is night fishing.
The main draw is into the semifinals and both are instructive.
Mochy is up against Philippe Lecomte, as true a representative of
old backgammon as could be. He is in his sixties, wears only white
linen and his reading glasses sit always at the end of a perma-tanned
nose. His unlit cigarette sits in unsmiling lips and he plays with
consummate cool, never touching the checkers until he moves. A
large part of his game appears to be icy intimidation, when
hitting a checker or making a block he looks straight down that
nose at his opponent. Unfortunately it is a useless tactic against
Mochy, who studies only the board and the heavens. He prevails and
is through to the final. |
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The other semi sees the defending champ Lars Trabolt of Denmark
against his friend Roland Herrera, a violinist from Bristol. Lars
felt that Roland and his wife Simonetta were underrated, and paid
their entry fees in return for seventy five percent of their
winnings, a deal which is typical in a game where a player can
hedge outcomes by betting on their opponent. He just beat
Simonetta in the quarters – narrowly avoiding an historic
matrimonial semi. And he has to come from behind to beat Roland in
a match which comes down to a winner-takes-all game.
Meanwhile I miss my second consolation match due to a late train;
my bad luck is holding, or perhaps it was never meant to be. In my
final game in the last chance draw I play Roland, a German who
imports furniture and stone Buddhas from Bali. He is probably
better than me, but I hold my nerve in an important game and am up
heading into the decider. And then the dice take over and my last
chance is up, or maybe Roland has built up such good Karma in his
line of work that he is invincible? At least he goes on to lose
the final and gets his money back along with a tiny cup. It’s so
tiny he should get a bigger cup for receiving the world’s smallest
cup. But I am just jealous, never have I been so close to possibly
being runner up in the last chance of the beginner’s section in a
real World Championship.
On finals day I walk into the hotel shorn of the need to think
backgammon and notice the music for the first time. Strange that
it is possible for good musicians to play Muzak live, but it is.
This week is the closest and longest proximity I have had to the
quite rich and they fulfill clichés admirably. Everyone is taught
and tanned, and rich men are allowed to wear pastel pants and I
wonder if perhaps they correspond to karate-like levels of wealth.
Lars and Mochy play the twenty-five point final in a side room,
with a live relay to us in the main hall. I’m learning the most I
have all week as commentary is provided by Falafel. At first they
level peg, then Mochy makes a mistake and at the break Lars has a
four point lead. Soon the Japanese turns it around and Lars seems
scared to accept any risks, declining the cube and losing game
after game. He fights back to within two and after five hours the
score is at twenty-two to twenty. In the decider Lars doubles
early, and Mochy must accept. After a few minutes he doubles back
and Lars cannot afford to decline. It’s now a four point game and
Lars must win. The game comes down to the wire, but Lars cannot
roll the dice to hit Mochy and loses the race to bear off his
checkers. He has just lost the chance to make history and retain
the championship, but he pockets thirty thousand euros plus his
percentage of Roland’s semifinal winnings. Mochy will take home
sixty three thousand and the world title. A victory for the new
robotics over more creative play, though later I chat with the new
champ and he talks with a Zen-like reverence for the game’s
possibilities and the indifference of the dice. At the
prize-giving he says he could not have done it without his
girlfriend and efficiently yet elegantly, he has proposed.
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