These are the terms of backgammon — the ones spoken at the board and the ones you need in order to read game analyses. Each entry carries its Russian and Turkish equivalent: the table at the end ties them together across languages.
The board and the equipment
Checker — one of the fifteen markers of a single colour that a player moves around the board by the rolls of the dice. It is also called a piece.
Die — the cube that decides a move. A die is said to be cocked if it does not land flat on the playing surface on the thrower’s side; such a roll is taken again. The dice are thrown from a cup of leather, plastic or wood.
Bar — the raised ridge down the middle of the board that divides the inner table from the outer one. Checkers that have been hit are placed on it.
Home board — the quadrant holding your one-point through six-point: the one a player brings the checkers into before bearing off.
Bar-point — a player’s seven-point, so named because it sits next to the bar.
Crossover — a checker moving from one quadrant of the board into the next.
Formations
Anchor — a point in the opponent’s home board held by two or more of your checkers. A high anchor is the 21, 20 or 19 point, sometimes the 18; a low anchor is the 24, 23 or 22.
Golden point — the five-point in your own home board (the opponent’s 20-point): the most valuable of the low anchors, because it blocks the most numbers on the opponent’s entry from the bar.
Midpoint — the thirteen-point, the same one a checker leaves in the notation
13/7.
Prime — six consecutive points with two or more checkers on each. Such a wall cannot be jumped by any roll.
Hitting
Blot — a lone checker on a point, open to being hit.
Slot — a checker deliberately left as a blot on a point a player wants to make, betting on covering it with a second checker next turn.
Direct shot — a chance to hit a blot no more than six points away with a single number on one die. A combination shot needs both numbers together — that is an indirect shot.
Loose hit — a hit that leaves the hitter a blot in their own home board, exposed to a direct return shot.
Comeback shot — a chance to hit the opponent’s blot right after being hit yourself, in particular straight from the bar.
The course of the game
Contact game — a position in which the players’ checkers have not yet passed each other and hitting is still possible.
Blitz — an attack on an opponent who has no anchor: the aim is to put as many of their checkers on the bar as possible and close your own board.
Running game — the plan of the player who is ahead: bring the checkers home and bear them off with as little contact with the opponent as possible. It has no positional complexity, and that is what separates it from the other plans.
Holding game — a plan in which a player keeps an anchor in the opponent’s home board, or occasionally on their bar point, to hinder the opponent’s bear-in and to hit a blot left behind while the outfield points are cleared.
Back game — a plan built on two or more points in the opponent’s home board and a bet on a late hit. How good it is remains disputed.
Ace-point game — a late stage of the game in which a player holds an anchor on the opponent’s one-point and waits for a shot while the opponent brings the checkers home and bears them off.
Duplication — placing the checkers so that the opponent needs the same numbers for different jobs. Their effective choice narrows, though they roll just as often.
Diversification — the mirror image applied to one’s own position: spreading the checkers out to increase the number of good rolls on the next turn.
Bear off — taking checkers off the board at the end of the game: whoever takes all fifteen off first wins.
Pip — the unit of distance: the total a player still has to move to bring the checkers home and bear them off is called the pip count.
Stakes and score
Doubling cube — a special die a little larger than a regular one, with the numbers 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 on its faces. It raises the stakes during a game; often it is simply called the cube.
Owner of the cube — the player who accepted the last double: only they may offer the next one in that game.
Gammon — a win over an opponent who bore off no checker at all: two points.
Backgammon — the same, but the loser also still has a checker on the bar or in the winner’s home board: three points. Such a win is called a triple game.
Match equity — the probability of winning the entire match from the current score with perfect play by both sides. The value of a position in a match is measured by this, not by the chance of winning a single game.
Equity table — a table of match chances, broken down by how many points each player has left to win. It is used to adjust the decision on the doubling cube.
MWC — Match Winning Chances: the probability of winning the match; the same value as match equity, named by its English abbreviation.
Take point — the lowest chances of winning a game at which accepting a double is more profitable than declining; below it, passing is cheaper.
Post-Crawford — all games of the match after the Crawford game. In them, the doubling cube is back in play, and it is almost always advantageous for the player behind, who has nothing more to lose, to double.
Proposition — repeated play of one position, often for money, when two players dispute its value, the best move, or the correct decision regarding the doubling cube and wish to settle it.
Chouette — a format for three or more players: one sits against all the others, who move through a captain. → Chouette and team play
How moves are written
Notation is the system a game is recorded in: the score, the rolls, the moves and the cube decisions. Unlike chess notation it is built simply — point numbers from 1 to 24 with a slash between them.
13/7— a checker moves from the thirteen-point to the seven-point;24/20— the same from twenty-four to twenty (splitting the back checkers);6/2— from the six to the two;bar/21— entering from the bar onto the twenty-one-point; the bar itself is written as the word bar;6/off— bearing a checker off the six-point; checkers borne off are written as off;- (2), (3), (4) — how many checkers make the same move;
- * — a hit, meaning an enemy checker sent to the bar. Some notations add the asterisk for exactly that.
A full line of the record looks like this: move number, roll, then the checker
moves — for instance 5. 6-2: 24/18, 13/11. Each line gives White’s roll and
move first, then Black’s; White itself is marked W.
Cube decisions are written as abbreviations: T or Tk — the cube was taken, P or Dr — the cube was dropped, B or Bvr — a beaver, an immediate re-double.
There is a practical reason to learn it: XG and GNU Backgammon use the same notation, and without it a software analysis of a game cannot be read.
Separately there is Nactation — Nack Ballard’s system for describing the first several moves of a game, its name an amalgamation of “Nack” and “action notation”. There a double is marked by a letter for the kind of move: H for a hit, A for attack, D for both checkers from the midpoint into the outer board, C for crossing the bar, B for both up and down, E for two in each inner board.
How a player’s strength is measured
Rating — a number attached to a player and computed from their record against other rated players.
PR (Performance Rating) — a different measure arrived at a different way: the player’s level is calculated by computer analysis of their games. A rating answers whom you beat; PR answers how accurately you played, whoever sat across the board. The analysis itself is on the programs page, and the Elo rating in the game’s history is on the history page.
The three-language table
The forms come from the localisation of our own app — it has been through live players in all three languages. A term the app does not have is absent from the table too.
| Term | English | Русский | Türkçe |
|---|---|---|---|
| point | Point | Пункт | Hane |
| checker | checker | Шашка | Pul |
| die | Die | Кость | Zar |
| home | Home | Дом | Ev |
| bar | bar | Бар | bar |
| bear off | bear off | Вывод | Toplama |
| pip | pip | Очко | Puan |
| match point | point | Очко | sayı puanı |
| doubling cube | Doubling cube | Куб удвоения | İkiye katlama küpü |
| gammon | Gammon | Гаммон | Gammon |
| backgammon | Backgammon | Бэкгаммон | Backgammon |
One note on the table: the word «backgammon» means both the game itself and the triple win in it. That is not our carelessness but a property of the English term, and in running text the two have to be told apart by the sense of the sentence.
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