There is an ancient board game that you can learn in 15 minutes and then think about for the rest of your life. I haven't met a human being yet that plays backgammon that the game doesn't get under their skin. That game will get to you. Backgammon has had a few heydays in modern history, especially among gamblers. She paid me in drugs and a Gucci sweater that her friends had boosted from their drive. NFL teams have used backgammon theory to win the Super Bowl. They're risk averse, at least they used to be before we came onto the scene. And now backgammon is having a whole new renaissance. People want in-person experiences, they want to get off dating apps, they want to make new friends. Today on Freakinomics Radio, we continue our occasional series on games with a simple question. Can backgammon save us from ourselves? Okay, the dice are yours. This is Freakinomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner. This past January, the U.S. Backgammon Federation held a big tournament, the New York Metropolitan Backgammon Open, at a hotel in Jersey City. They drew more than 400 players in a variety of brackets from beginner to grandmaster. They came from all over the U.S., as well as Germany, South Africa, Greece, Peru. The field included many of the world's top ranked players, like this one. My name is Masayuki Mochizuki, people call me Mochi, I am a professional backgammon player. Mochi is arguably the best backgammon player alive. He has turned the game into a career. By tournaments, everywhere in the world, teaching, writing a book, playing a Friday game, and everything about the backgammon, that's me. Mochi had flown in from Japan for the Jersey City tournament, but he busted out in the first round. That's the thing about backgammon. It is a dice game, which means it can be volatile, and the better player does not always win. I found Mochi in a side room off the tournament area. He was playing a money game with some of the others who had already busted out of the tournament. And told me he was staying on in New York City for a few days, so I invited him to come play backgammon at my apartment. If you want to just play great, if you want to teach and talk while we play, I'm happy to play for money. I don't expect you to play for free. No, no. It's fine. We can't play for free enough. But I mean, I know that's how you make your living, so I ask you to work from there. I have $500 in my life. I'm not planning to leave with this. 500 lasts like three minutes, but it's okay. I'm joking. One, four. Thank you. Nice roll. Come on. Things changed very fast. Now it's an even game. If you hit, I'm dead. 52. This is very scary. Yeah. Don't be scared. No, I am scared. Okay, this is going to be a shot anyway, so I've got to hit those. So this is the roll. If I roll the four, I'm going to win. If I don't roll the four, I'm probably going to lose. They roll in the middle. It's okay. All right. Very cool. Backman is not a game that you decide the strategy. All you can do is you follow the dice's advice. You're not going to against the dice. The game plan that you had in your mind that you don't get that long gone. Got it. Got it. That being said, maybe I hit you, actually. I was thinking about doing this. That would have been terrible. Because if you waited longer than I have more ammunition to coming and it will be more dangerous. It's actually all about timing. This game actually has a lot of similarity in life. To life? You don't know what's going to happen. It's all about probability. If you make a good choice, you have a better chance to get a better outcome, right? But it's just a chance. You may lose because of the good choice. But you shouldn't regret that you made that choice because that then was a good choice. You have to be confident, one, two, three, four, one. It was a good game. It was really good. I thought even I'll win this one. Well, my $500 did last more than three minutes, maybe an hour. We played three short matches and Mochi won all of them. But I held my own against a World Champion. I certainly couldn't do that on the basketball court or football field. That is just one of the many interesting things about this game. Another is what Mochi said about how Backgammon is a lot like life itself. I would hear some version of that from just about everyone I spoke with as we were making this episode. At the Jersey City Tournament, I had met a very good player named Melissa Shin who works as an architect in Los Angeles. She told me to get in touch with her next time I was in town and she would put together an event with her Backgammon club. Yes, there are Backgammon clubs more and more all the time. And I happened to be in LA soon after so we met up at a beer garden in Venice Beach. Melissa had set up a game for me. We're going to do doubles. I think me and Frank against you guys. Oh, it's me and Bob against you and Frank. Alright, here it is, make it fun, this could be fun. My partner was Bob Wachtell, a ranked Grandmaster. A couple of years ago, I had taken a few lessons from him. Melissa's partner, Frank Friego, is another world class player, a two time world champion. I'm not going to make you listen to another match, but I will say this, Bob and I won. Take that Mochi. Later on, I sat down with Frank Friego, asked him to introduce himself. My name is Frank Friego and I am somewhat semi-retired. I'm playing a lot of professional backgammon these days. I travel to tournaments, I teach, I lecture. I did have an analytics company for about 13 years and I still do some consulting in sports betting and sports analytics. Have all the games ever invented and ever played, is backgammon your favorite game? I haven't played all of them for sure, but I would argue it's the greatest game. It has all the elements of complexity. The pace is wonderful, it's designed as a gambling game, it's a fantastic mind sport. The game has played at amazing locations around the world, it's got a beautiful aesthetic. If you come to one of our tournaments, you will see the most beautiful custom made backgammon boards. There's something about the sound, the touch, the feel that adds to the whole experience. I think it's, yeah, I think it's the greatest game out there. If you were to call backgammon an industry, I'm not sure whether you would use that word or a sector, how do you think about the size of it? I've heard something like 300 million people play globally in some countries where it has a long, deep history. You see backgammon or tovla or shesh-base, however they want to call it, in particular, culture is played everywhere. What I see even in the United States is that there's multiple tiers. There's this social component of it, then there's the casual tournament player, then you have the more serious tournament player, there's a big spectrum. For someone who doesn't know the game, just explain it as briefly as you can, the basic setup and goal. Okay, so each site has 15 checkers in a particular starting arrangement and the game is essentially a race. Your pieces or your stones as they would have called it way back in the day, you're trying to get them around the board and into your home board. There's four quadrants. You try to get those checkers into your home board and bear them off as quickly as possible. But along the way, there's a lot of contact and those checkers interact. If you land on a spot where your opponent only has a single checker, we call that a blot that blot has to go back to the beginning. So, while it's a race, it's not that simple. Sometimes you're trying to slow yourself down, sometimes you're trying to speed yourself up.
And talk about the leverage and the excitement and volatility that is introduced by using the doubling cube. The idea behind the doubling cube is that you're playing a game for a stake of a single point. If you win the game, you get a point. If you bear off all your checkers before your opponents mourn off any, you win a gammon. That's a double game. But it's double whatever the current value of the cube is. The cube starts out at a value of one. When it's your turn, before you roll, you have the option if the cube is in the middle to tell your opponent, "I want to double the stakes of the game." So the opponent has to then make a decision, "Do I want to play this game for double the stakes or do I want to turn down the cube?" And the game ends immediately and they give up the point. The decision is I can give up one point with certainty and start a brand new game, or I can accept the cube and now play this game for double the stakes, but I'm accepting the risk that I could lose two points, I could lose four points, and I have to compare that distribution of potential outcomes versus the guaranteed one point that I would relinquish. The other layer on top of that is that the cube is not just a scorekeeping device, it's a weapon. When you own the cube, you have bought the rights to it, which gives you the rights to play the game to the end, and it also gives you the rights to redouble the stake back to four, which puts pressure on your opponent. If you do not know how to handle the cube, you're never going to win a tournament. That is Mark Olson, another of the world's top ranked players. He's Danish and used to play professional soccer, so yes, he's pretty competitive. The dobbling cube is a fantastic device that was invented in the 1920s. Backgammon has existed for thousands of years, but the dobbling cube has only been around for around a hundred years. It must have been so boring before and then. But there's still play backgammon without the cube in many parts of the world, but I agree, the dobbling cube is the most fun part about backgammon. With checker play moves, you can compare your move to other moves, which inherently make it easier, because you've got something to compare to, whereas with the dobbling cube, you've got nothing to compare to. That's the thing about the dobbling cube. It occupies its own special dimension in the game. The two dice that you roll on every turn that dictate where you can move your checkers, they are inherently random, so you have to plan for and adapt to that randomness. The dobbling cube is the only part of the game that can be unilaterally controlled, and who invented the cube? As Frank Friego told us, that fact is still in dispute within the backgammon community. He mentioned a 1930 New Yorker article that identified one possible inventor. We have heard much debate on whether backgammon is basically a game of skill. They say the innovation of dobbling was important. This, according to one story, was thought of by the grand Duke Demetri, who lives in Paris, where backgammon is called Trinketruck, and who has been playing it for years. Demetri Pavlovich Romanov was a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, and one of the few Romanov dukes to survive the Russian Revolution. He is thought to have been involved in the plot to murder Grigory Rasputin, so yes, the history of backgammon is littered with interesting characters. As for the question of luck versus skill, here is Frank Friego. It's a really difficult question because you've got to put some real context around it. Every decision with the exception of forced moves in backgammon is a skillful decision. The issue is how much it actually affects the outcome. We're going to get randomness thrown into the equation, which is what makes the game great. I'm going to oversimplify poker for a second, but imagine you're at the World Series main event and take whoever you think is the most skillful poker player on the planet. Let's just say it's Phil Ivey. At the World Series main event in a showdown, I could take someone, a five-year-old kid, that has never played poker in their life, and I could give them a very simple set of rules where I could guarantee they could take down the top player probably a third of the time. I could prove that mathematically. I could just get them to push the whole time and eventually the opponent will have to call. In backgammon, if you took somebody you just introduced to the game and they played a top-level player at a major tournament length match, say 19 to 25 points, they would have almost a zero chance of beating that player because you have so many active decisions you can't simplify the game down to that level. This is going to make poker players cringe because I'm oversimplifying poker, but it's a fact. Frank, you are a two-time World Backgammon champion, correct? Yes. I'd love you to walk me through both your wins. First, 1994, give me the who, what, when, where, why of that tournament win? That was a very memorable experience. The World Championship has been played in Monte Carlo since the 1970s. It's been at the same location, the Fairmont Hotel, the Psychonic Hotel. I was with my wife and we decided to go to Europe for an extended road trip to Monte Carlo. I was a fairly accomplished player back then. I played a decent amount. I didn't have kids yet or anything. I got on a roll and it was like a magic carpet ride for me because I didn't really have a close match. The quality of play back then wasn't as good as it is today, but I just got on a very good roll. I won the main event. Eight matches undefeated. I entered the Super Jackpot, which is the big separate event and I went undefeated in that as well. That was 1994. Your second one was in 2023. That's an amazingly long stretch to be at the peak of your game. What was the difference between Frank Friego in 1994 and Frank Friego in 2023? In 1994, I had more physical stamina, but I don't think I was as seasoned as a player to handle the emotional swings of the game, which are a big component of it. In '94, I was fortunate that I won a lot of matches by very clean scores, so I didn't have a lot of those more difficult emotional tests. In 2023, I had a lot of close matches. I had some crazy turnaround and some late swings, but I was much better conditioned as a player to whether that, to be able to sort of turn the page and not let it get under my skin and say, "What do I do now?" New circumstance, new set of conditions, regardless of what transpired last game, I've got to focus on what's going on in front of me and give myself the best chance. In '94, it was a blur. In '23, I really embraced it and enjoyed every step of the way and got to celebrate it with a lot of friends, which was really fun, too. What would you say are the characteristics of a good back-em-and-player, including perhaps some characteristics that might surprise people? A lot of people think you've got to be like a mathematician. You really don't. There are very analytical aspects of the game where you're grinding numbers, like what you would call match equities, where you've got to weigh a bunch of information and come up with the highest probability outcome. I feel like I'm pretty good at that, but there's also a big pattern recognition component. Once you're a few moves into the game, maybe you've got some reference positions in your mind that you've seen before, but it's just a combinatorial explosion when you get a few moves into a game. You haven't seen it before. Something that I think a lot of players underestimate is the execution part. It's one thing to sit in front of your computer and look at problems as quiz problems and say, what would I do? But it's an entirely different thing to do it over the board facing an opponent, traveling to a tournament. I will tell you, I haven't met a human being yet that plays back in and that the game doesn't get under their skin. That game will get to you because you just feel like your best laid plans get thrown aside. This ability to turn the page and look at a new circumstance, a new problem, and treat it independently and not to think superstitiously, you just got to purge your brain of all that pollution and really focus in a disciplined way on what's in front of you. How do I frame my decision? How do I focus solely on only what I can control? Have you seen examples where someone just kind of becomes a more rounded person, a rounded thinker by playing games, whether it's back in or something else? Maybe that person was you? It's definitely me. I've taken things from my life and put them into the game, but I think the game has given me much more in that direction. I co-direct the San Diego Club, which is one of the biggest, fastest growing clubs in the country. We have a number of people that play with us for different reasons. Some of them just love the competition. They love it as a mind sport, the intellectual stimulation, the social aspect. But another thing you hear, particularly from some of the older population, is they like to play because they feel like it keeps their mind sharp. Everybody's paranoid these days about dimension. They want to keep their minds stimulated. Back in, it just does such a good job of that. You've got a lot of active decisions. You have to think probabilistically. I would say that the uncertainty component is more realistic of what people encounter in the business world and in social decisions. Chess is a great game, but Chess, if you make. the best move, it's the difference often between a 100% winning path and a 100% losing path. Whereas in Back Amid, it's more probabilistic, and I think that is more like the decisions we encounter in real life. I had been told that Frank Friego had put his Back Amid obsession to good use in the analytics firm he founded and ran. We built proprietary models for a variety of applications in sports, in commodity trading, in healthcare, in education. The idea was to take a game-based approach to solving difficult problems. There's a lot of data out there, but there's not a lot of good ways to take that data and steer it towards a particular objective. So in commodity trading, it might be ROI. In education, it might be how to reduce freshman attrition rates. In healthcare, it was how to reduce hospital read missions for cardiac patients. And then, of course, in sports, one of the big, big breakthroughs that we applied was we took a lot of ideas from the modeling of games and applied it to professional football. When you say applied it to football, what kinds of scenarios or with what kind of goals in mind? Originally, when I was just watching the game as a fan and I was a pretty seasoned Back Amid player, I would look at what appeared to be the inherent risk aversion bias of head football coaches. They would get to fourth down decisions and they would sort of pucker up and relinquish possession. You're saying they're very risk averse. At least they used to be before we came on to the scene. It struck me that those kinds of decisions are very, very similar to Back Amid decisions and decisions that were modeled. One of the great breakthroughs in the modeling of games and Back Amid in particular was that when you focus on the proper objective, which in Back Amid is giving yourself the highest probability of winning the match. And in football, if you apply the same metric, which is how do I make a decision that gives me the highest expected outcome of a win, not maximizing yardage, not assuring I get some amount of points on a particular drive. When you shift that objective in that metric, it really opens things up and you start to see that these risk averse decisions are actually quite wrong. We set out to build a model that could actually measure it. We did this by building a fully customizable simulation model that was built on a lot of NFL empirical data. My partner, Chuck Bauer, who was also an experimental physicist, did a lot of research at Indiana University and worked for NASA. He and I put our heads together to build a model that could simulate NFL games from start to finish, running clock, penalties, the whole thing. We had a hypothesis that coaches were giving up quite a bit. It turned out after we started studying it more deeply that they were worse at it than we even thought they were. They were giving up even more than we got excited. We're like, it's time to start knocking on some doors. And so how much is your model or versions of your model used in the NFL today? I would say it influenced probably just about every team, some more directly, some indirectly. We licensed to about 12 NFL teams. Most famously, we worked with the Philadelphia Eagles during their Super Bowl run. They used it religiously. We had buy-in from top to bottom, from Jeff Laurie, the owner, to Howie Rose, Minda GM, to Doug Peterson, and also with the Kansas City Chiefs. When you see Andy Reed on the headset during a game, he's speaking to Mike Frazier up in the booth and Mike Frazier was consulting our models. Let me back up and make sure I understand. For Philadelphia Eagles fan, let's say, or a Kansas City Chiefs fan, their Super Bowl victories over the past several years, you're saying are derived in some part from the application of Beckham and theory? Yes, absolutely. When the Eagles adopted it, we worked very closely with their analytic stuff. They had some of their own internal models, but they were basically calibrating everything off of ours because it was a lot more sophisticated. The real similarity of football to Beckham and is that you score in these unusual increments. Where in games like baseball, you're basically trying to produce runs and trying to keep your opponent from producing runs, and that correlates very, very well with wind probability. Football is very different because you have a decaying clock and you score in different increments, so the utility of points changes dramatically based on the state of the game, and that's something that has been very, very well modeled in Beckham. Coming up after the break, how did that modeling happen? And just how wild was the backgammon scene in the 1970s and 80s? I'm Stephen Dubner, this is Free Kinomics Radio, we will be right back. Backgammon is the best one of all the games. You could also say it's a game of economics, but then economics is also kind of life. That again is Mark Olson. In addition to being a top-ranked player, he co-founded and runs Backgammon Galaxy, an online platform for playing and studying the game. Backgammon Galaxy was an idea that came up between me, Sandra Leilaff and Mochi back in 2018. Mochi and Sandra are basically the two biggest Beckhammon legends in the world. The idea was simply just to have a unified grant backgammon site because it was kind of lacking. We just set out to do it. A bit of naivety there. Me and Sandra came from the world of sports betting. Basically, I was a quant and sports betting for the last 10 years prior to that. In 2019 or so, I went full time on backgammon Galaxy trying to get this project up and running. We thought that we were going to be a money gaming site because that was kind of like the world we came from, but it wasn't really a good business plan. It's a very regulated market. We had trouble really getting off the ground. In the meantime, we had a YouTube channel. It became the biggest Beckhammon YouTube channel quite fast. We realized that the opportunities in mobile gaming and social gaming were actually gigantic. The market is really, really big. So we pivoted and we started creating a product and we raised some money and we had the first real version, I would say, of backgammon Galaxy launched in 2022. How many players are on the site and how do you make money? We have about 220,000 users. We have a subscription and then we have some social coins. You can't withdraw them or anything for a real value. It's just purely in the game, but you have users purchasing these coins as well. How much money do you actually make if you can tell me? I don't think I'm in a position to reveal that. We are still in a competitive space, but it's a business that is at least aimed toward profitability or no? Yes, it is. I mean, we've raised money a couple of times and we keep expanding. Our team is now 25 people. Half of them are so are developers and the rest are dealing with customs aboard YouTube, social media, all kinds of live tournaments. We own the world championship. So once a year in Monte Carlo, we host the world championship. Let's spend a couple of minutes talking about this nice point that you raise about backgammon as an illustration of economic thinking. In what ways do you see those parallels? Let's talk about trade-offs that you face in every decision because backgammon is a multi-dimensional game where all the variables they are entangled. You can't just say all else being equal. It doesn't exist because every time you change one variable, all the other variables change. There's constantly trade-offs to be made. Sometimes they are macro. I have a decision here between a priming game plan or a blitz attack. Sometimes it's micro. Do I promote that back checker one pip over there that slightly improves my racing chances? Or do I want to split it with in front? What about ideas like opportunity cost and sunk cost and decision-making under uncertainty? Do you actively factor in those ideas as you're playing or is it more like they're just humming beneath the surface? Sunk cost, I think any professional investor or games player at a high level knows he should not dwell too much on sunk cost. It's in the past. Focus on making the best play. Opportunity cost comes in a lot in backgammon as well, especially when you're choosing between game plans. If you pursue this one game plan, there's an opportunity cost. It affects the optionality of going to another game plan, and later decision-making under uncertainty. That's literally what you do on every single move in backgammon. There's actually several levels to it. We do have complete information of the game. We can see all the pieces. Nothing is hidden, but we don't know the upcoming dice rolls. The future is uncertain, just like the universe. Life is uncertain. The world is uncertain, even at a quantum level. In backgammon, we learn to deal with it. There's a psychological aspect to it. Playing games, it trains you for being a more robust person. It rewards hard work, and especially backgammon. If you're lazy and think you can win, you're going to lose. If you are reckless with your decision-making and you're taking the general risk, you're going to be punished immediately. So even for kids, I want to
to teach my son to play backgammon, for that reason. - I've heard you say that you want to teach your son to play backgammon not only for the sake of the game, but because gambling itself is a really good way to learn about the world and yourself. Can you just talk about that? I've heard you say that most people look at gambling as pure vice and you have a different view. - Exactly. So let's start by making a distinction. My distinction is that if you're betting on something like a roulette table, then you have no control of the outcome, it's purely gambling. I don't see any good in that, but if you're talking about backgammon, or to some extent also poker, or to some extent also sports betting, where you can get an informational advantage, you can analyze the game in a way that is better than the market, or even when you see the rise now of the prediction market sites. So I do see that as a virtue more than a vice that again, hard work is rewarded. There's instant negative feedback on your path decisions. You harden your personality and your mental abilities to deal with stress and misfortune. We've played backgammon or a similar variant, basically as long as we've had dice. It has that advantage over other games that it simply evolved into this perfect equilibrium style of game where it's not too long, it's not too short. It has the right amount of luck to skill ratio. It's just a very balanced and perfect game. Backgammon is indeed one of the oldest games in the world. In various forms, it has been played continuously in the Middle East since 3,000 BCE. During the Crusades, it became a popular gambling game in Europe, Richard the Lionheart of England and Philip II of France, issued a joint order banning the game for low-ranking soldiers. Dan, rather, in a 1978 piece for 60 minutes, rattled off these and many other backgammon facts as he discussed the rising popularity of the game. In the United States, it has played everywhere. In the CBS cafeteria, for example. In modest rooms like the Bar Point Club on New York's 14th Street, where the winner of the weekly tournament can win a few dollars. And it has played in elegant private clubs where the rich and famous gather to dance and drink and play. It was basically Hugh Hefner, who was responsible for backgammon becoming a fad in the 1970s. Because he proposed this kind of hedonistic, sophisticated, glamorous lifestyle that involved lots of consumption of alcohol, some drugs, lots of sex, and anything that looked privileged and sophisticated. That is Bob Wactel, my partner at the Los Angeles meetup. Wactel got a PhD in philosophy, but as a profession, he chose gambling. He was a world-class backgammon player and a backgammon writer, chronicling the scene, and it was quite a scene to chronicle. I first learned to play in Toronto in 1977. I went to Disco's and there were backgammon sets in Disco's. Backgammon tables. I played a guy there and the guy wrote me a check on a napkin. I said, "What's this?" He said, "Don't you know anything?" He said, "A check is just a piece of paper that the bank issues, but I'm writing my account number right on this napkin." So this is just as good as a check. If you went to tournaments, you'd find the most zany collection of characters. There were lots of people who pretended to be royalty. There were snobs of different kinds and posers and drifters and people who were cheaters and lots of people were phonies, but none of them were very good at backgammon. And most of them believed that they were much, much better than they were, so they'd be willing to play anyone. In the early '70s, backgammon was a place of magical thinking. And people believed that it was a game of luck. It didn't do any work, most of them. But there was some work you could do and there was some calculation. There were ways of learning the game, which most of the populists didn't participate in at all. Did you do a lot of that kind of work yourself? I didn't do as much as some other people. If you really cared to learn specific elements of the game, you would set up a position and play it many times. People weren't shy about expressing their opinions in those days. You would make a move and one of your compatriots would say, that's ridiculous, how could anybody do that? And immediately, you could challenge them to propositions. And those were situations you'd set up where each person would get their turn to make their move. And the game would be played out to the end. And then you'd turn the board around and allow the other person to make their move. You'd log a whole bunch of data, not all of it was that valuable, because if you didn't play these games, well, in subsequent moves, it didn't prove very much. But there were some very simple situations, especially in bear offs at the last couple of moves of the game where the game could be played out in 10 seconds. And you could log hundreds of games and sometimes, if you had an advantage, you could log hundreds and hundreds of dollars. And some people, we should say, wrote not one, but two books just about the bear off situation. Yes, that would be you. Yes, but only a tiny segment of the bear off. The first volume, I decided to name it in the game until the end, because back in the day at the Mayfair Club in New York, the marks or pigeons, when they got in these positions would say, at least I'm in the game until the end. There was a lot of mockery of the pigeons. I always liken it to the vista that the pioneers in America encountered when the bison covered the planes of the whole country. And you could shoot them at will. They were always there for the taking. That was what it was like in the early '70s. And the pigeons or marks or suckers or whales or whatever you want to call them, were they the same cast of characters? Or did you have to refresh the pigeons? There was an inflow of new pigeons, but the hustlers of the day would husband them themselves into their little flocks. There were some hustlers at that club who really weren't good players at all, but they had flocks of even worse players, much worse players who they shelter from people like me. You're supporting yourself. This is your profession. Yeah. Can you give some insight into your earnings? I'm guessing you don't have a nice statistically sound career earnings calculation. No, I never kept records, but there were lots of times when I was not paid, when I was cheated. There was lots of stuff along the way that happened at that time. I once played this Coke dealer, a woman Coke dealer, and she paid me in drugs. I bet she did, yeah. A little bit of money and a Gucci sweater that her friends had boosted from a shop and rodeo drive. And was that a kind of typical scene for a guy like you? Would we call you a hustler? Is that-- I wouldn't call myself a hustler. No, because to me, a hustler is someone who fangs in capacity. You didn't hide your ability. No, not at all, not at all. How did you develop and keep your opponents playing you for money when you were plainly better? There was this great club, the Cavendish Club, in Los Angeles. I could go there every night and have a game. What were the stakes? They used to play $10 or $20 a point, which would be like $75 or $100 today, something like that. So you could come out of there with several hundred dollars in '90s, maybe a couple thousand, right? Sure, sure. And overall, just to give a sense of the luck versus the skill, overall in a given year, do you think you were ever down for a given year? Oh, no. No, no, no. Oh, no, he says confidently. So Mark, who would be the ideal Mark? Would I be really good because I'm decent, but maybe good enough to think that I'm better than I am? And I'll just keep coming back and giving you my money like an ATM. The ideal customer is someone who's very wealthy and enjoys locking horns with someone who's also good enough to give them the great challenge. So how good were you at the time? By today's standards, I was terrible, but I was one of the better players around. Things got much more difficult. The Neural Networks had a great effect on backgammon society. That's an interesting conundrum. I'd love you to explain when the Neural Networks came along. And you could actually identify what were good moves and what were bad moves. And you could acquire what's called an error rate or performance rating. What was that like for you? For me, personally, it was a joy because I had a stack of note cards, a foot high of positions I'd never been able to figure out even rolling out. I tried and tried and tried. And all of a sudden, I could--
get the answers. It was bliss, but it was very annoying in the sense that the bad players could see how bad they were, and it more or less killed the money action in back emin. The worst players all of a sudden realized how bad they were. There was a lawyer who lived in Marin County at plenty of money. I played him for five years or so. I must have won almost every time we played, and at the end of those five years, and this is before the neural networks came along. He explained to me, he said, "Look, Bob, you have a slight edge on me, but we're basically at the same level. People could just live in that kind of delusion for years and years. But when the neural networks came along, not only did the worst players realize they were bad, but if they weren't willing to work and learn themselves, they'd fade away." Before the neural nets, nobody really knew what the best place were. That's Mark Olson again. Back emin Galaxy is built atop a neural network that plays the game at a superhuman level. I asked him how this technology came about. In the 90s, AI algorithms with reinforcement learning was invented, a guy called Gerald Tissaro invented a program called TD Gammon. This was the first neural net to play by Gammon really well, stronger than even the best players in the world. Where did this come in the development of AI play? This was basically around the time when Deep Blue were playing against Kasparov. Gerald Tissaro used backgammon as a case study for his new AI algorithm. Bygammon was such a perfect environment for that because it's a multi-dimensional game where all these dimensions interact with each other because there's so many trade-offs and the variables are entangled, yet it's still a small enough universe that you can just reproduce data as much as you want. You can simulate the games and it worked exceptionally well. When you say it worked, that means that in any given moment in any game, there is an optimal move essentially, correct? Let me explain a little bit how these AI algorithms work. You have, let's call it a play agent, that's the agent making the moves, and then you have a learner, we call it the value function in machine learning. So you're training your value function as a function of the results that the play agent decisions are making. Basically it's a self-learning algorithm. The best move is simply the move that has the higher value in the value equation. Because we have the computer engines, the neural nets that more or less solve the game, the level at the top is so high nowadays that it's much more a game of not making mistakes. Does that take some of the fun out of it? I don't think so. If you are a really high level player, what is your motivation? For me, it's this mastery achievement thing. I'm not playing against you. I'm playing against myself. Here's how Bob Wachtel described it in his book, The Backgammon Chronicles, a pros adventure on tour, volume one. Backgammon has evolved from a model like that of soccer, basketball, or tennis, he wrote, where it is the fantastic, inspired shot that will be the object of awe for years to come to a sport like gymnastics or ice skating or diving where the entire goal is to perform a flawless routine, a perfect 10, i.e. a zero error rating. I went back to Wachtel to talk about this evolution. You know, when we started this conversation, you talked about the 70s and 80s as this golden era of Backgammon. There was a lot of action and a lot of excitement and the play was starting to get a lot better, but how would you compare the current era? I mean, it must feel very tame. How do you feel or how do you describe the current era where there is a lot of competition, a lot of tournament play? I assume there's a lot less of the kind of gambling action that you're describing here. Yeah, right. It's much more normalized. Is it boring? Well, I mean, it's not nearly as exciting. I would say that. I think it is undergoing a minor renaissance. I don't think it could ever reach the manic levels of the 70s because the whole Playboy lifestyle was what got people engaged in, and they were all sort of buying into this vision of the good life, which people are a lot more cynical now and aware of the pratfalls and pitfalls they can encounter. How pleased are you with this mini renaissance? Do you think it's good for the world? Definitely. I am very pleased with it. I think it's great. Coming up after the break, we meet a leader of the Backgammon renaissance. This is Frekenon McTradio. My name is Stephen Dubner, and we will be right back. The Backgammon program XG, or ExtremeGammon, was released in 2009, and it became the go-to software for serious players. Last year, it was bought by Travis Kalanick, a founder and former CEO of Uber. He is also a Backgammon obsessive. Kalanick is expected to invest significantly in the site with modern AI and machine learning. It definitely feels like we are in the middle of a Backgammon renaissance. We've seen two different things. That's Mark Olsen again. One is the rise of online Backgammon with Begama Galaxy and other Begama apps on the phone, and the other thing is the rise of the social clubs all across the United States, right now hosting these incredible social events where people come just to play Backgammon. I think it's amazing. It's something we haven't seen before. I don't know how big it can be, but it's very exciting, especially in New York City, Begama Club, Remington Davenport, is doing a great job. Hi, it's Remi. Remi! Hi! How are you? I'm doing so well. Thank you. How are you doing? I'm dying to know why you're doing so well. I'm very happy about it, but I just had like an amazing weekend. I treated myself to a present. It was a Backgammon purse and I've been eyeing it for so long. You can like open it and it's a full board and it comes with the pieces and oh and I got my Backgammon table delivered that I designed. So this was just like a very big Backgammon girl weekend. So how did you first get into the game? My parents taught me how to play. I never really wanted to play with them. I had a group of six girlfriends in middle school and we played Backgammon every weekend. We were very competitive over everything and nothing. When we played Backgammon, we were very physically abusive. We would flip the boards and throw dice at each other. We were so crazy. We were just like look for anything to compete over, but it was all in like good fun. But now I'm like good sportsmanship and good etiquette is the only thing I believe in. But don't look at me when I was playing as a kid because I was a monster. Were you playing for stakes for money or anything? No, nothing. Bragging rights. A few years ago, Devon Port founded the New York City Backgammon Club. To put it simply, it's a social club to play and learn Backgammon. It's really focusing on community and bringing people together over this concept of being offline. At the heart of it is making new friends and meeting new people and pushing yourself to want to improve. I also started gals who gammon. When I go to these tournaments all over the world, I've noticed it's really about 10% women attendance. In 2024, Devon Port attended her first Backgammon World Championship in Monte Carlo. She says it was life changing. Oh my god. Walking into that room, I was almost in tears. There's 300 people in this room obsessed with the same thing I'm obsessed with, like how freaking cool is this? I'm building a community in New York, but then there's this community of US tournament players. These people in the US have been playing with each other for decades. When they go to tournaments, it's a reunion. But then on top of that, going to the world championship, I've made friends from all over the world. This makes it sound as if, and please don't take offense by this, but this makes it sound as if you are Backgammon and Backgammon is you and there is no space between the two. There is no offense there. Backgammon is my life. And that's it. There's nothing else going on, you know. What do you see yourself as with Backgammon in, I don't know, pick your interval, two years, five years, 50 years. The basics is just growing the game in the United States and then definitely global. I'm starting to expand to other cities. I'm encouraging people from around the world to get into it, start their own club, do their thing, practice more, plan line, plan person, whatever. Backgammon in this country seems to have a craze every half century, right? In the 1920s, it was big in the 1970s. And maybe the craze is really going to be that big again now. No, we're in it. We're on the path. The reason it's having a surge now, and I started my club three years ago, I can put a lot of my success on the change of society, which is people want in-person experiences. They want to be offline. They want to get off dating apps. They want to have experiences. I don't know what happened in the 80s for it to die down, but
The reason it's coming back now is there is a big change in society of wanting to get offline and connect with people and be human again. So I started NYC Backhamming Club kind of as a joke. I knew 10 people in New York. I was just looking for a place to play. I had a full-time job and I started hosting an event every week in 2023 and people started coming. I'm like, whoa, this is so crazy and I don't have a social media or marketing background. I'm a sales gal. What were you selling? A lot of bullsh*t. There was always in startups. It's not even worth talking about. So I started hosting these events and I'll never forget the first event that I had 50 people at and I just went home and cried. I didn't even know 50 people in New York. Then I was like, okay, this is it. I left my job after a year of starting the club because I just felt like I could not be one foot in the door and one foot out the door of trying to grow back in my host events Sunday through Thursday night. I'm killing myself still doing events. Does your club have a dedicated physical space? No. New Yorkers are tough. You know, people don't go below 14th. They don't go on the east side. They don't go to west side. They don't go to Brooklyn. I'm trying to just do as many events as I can for as many people and people love to try new places. Remy, the first time we met, you were helping run this national tournament in Jersey City. I see you have some kind of role in the US backgammon federation. I'm on the board of directors. I'm trying to make it more approachable for new people. My job in general is I'm trying to bridge this gap of club players in the US and the tournament world. Can I tell you about my back in my league? Yes, please. It's one of the things I'm most proud about. The first season we had 64 people. I built a whole website and a schedule and every team has their own home bar. You either play home or away. I keep track of individual scores and team scores and it's tournament play. Five people from each team compete. You play in a seven point match if you're in intermediate and nine points if you're advanced. Everyone gets a league shirt comes with their registration and then I give out prizes and trophies and stuff. Now we're in the fourth season and this season was actually 235 people, which was really cool. I'm sure there have been events even that you've organized. We're some character comes who just ends up being whatever a drag nasty creepy nasty whatever in some way. How do you handle that? It's great question because I'm very, very hardcore and I have a zero tolerance for bullshit. This sucks to say this is not the case for everyone. I've met a thousand wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people, but there can be one bad apple that really screws your entire tournament experience and you may never want to come back because a man was super misogynistic for whatever reasons. Maybe you beat him. Maybe just simply for sitting down at the table. These are things I've experienced. If there's consequences for bad behavior, then we can start to change for decades. A lot of people were scared that back him and wasn't growing, so they weren't necessarily kicking people out. If you set the standard of really welcoming and loving and fun, it sells itself. When poker started being played online, there was a whole new, not just generation, but a whole new style of poker player who had never played anybody else in person then they began showing up to tournaments and sometimes they would win. Are you seeing people who get very, very, very good outside the established realm of playing in person? There's definitely people that come to my club being like, you know, I've only been playing on the computer or on my phone and I'm a little nervous. I'm like, don't even worry. We're all nice here. There is this world of playing online and then trying to get into tournaments. It's so different. What's different about tournament play? In tournaments, sometimes the rooms are absolutely ice cold. Sometimes they're so hot. There's so much stimulation. There's smelly people. There's like just so much crazy shit going on and the stamina of just sitting there and focusing game after game. I recently stopped in at a small tournament that Davenport was hosting on a Monday evening at a hotel in Lower Manhattan. My first opponent was a friendly guy named Nick, maybe in his 30s. It's nice to meet you. I don't think we can fit here quite. Do you have a board? I have a board, but it's pretty big. I'll have one little smaller yet. That's a good size. Yeah, that'll work. I have to say I was feeling pretty good about my game. I'd had that solid showing against Mochi in my pairs match in L.A., Bob Wachtell and I had beat Frank Frego and Melissa Shin. I'd even taken a game from Mark Olson when we played on Backgammon Galaxy. But Nick beat me. So that knocked me out of the main bracket. I dropped into the consolation bracket and I promptly busted out of that one as well. But I don't regret a minute of it. Nick and I even made a plan to play squash sometime. It's nice to make a new friend. Thanks, backgammon. Here's Remi Davenport again. Poker and Chess are so much bigger than Backgammon. They want to get Backgammon as mainstream. Backgammon is just way more social game. You play with one hand and there's a drink in your other hand. That's the game. And what does mainstream Backgammon look like? I'm going to have a tournament at MSG. I've been talking about this forever. I've been putting it on my dream journal or a manifestation board. Whatever it is. I don't know how long that will take, but we're going to do it. You may think that Madison Square Garden hosting a Backgammon tournament is absolutely impossible. Until a few weeks ago, the idea of the Garden hosting the New York Knicks and the NBA Finals also seemed impossible. I thought back to something Bob Wachtell had said when I asked him what's so great about Backgammon? It's very entertaining. It's entertaining because the things you imagine are impossible happen and things that you would swear are unlikely can happen just as often as that. I also thought back to something Frank Friego said when I'd asked him the same question. I think of Backgammon as a masochistic mindfulness. When I'm playing, I'm not thinking about anything else. Hours could go by. I forget to eat. I forget every other thing going on in my life. I'm going through all of these ups and downs and twists and turns. You're getting these little dopamine rushes. You roll a good number. Something goes well. It goes poorly. You feel alive. I'm actually experiencing something. My big thanks to Frank Friego, Bob Wachtell, Remy Davenport, Mark Olson, Melissa Shinn, and Mochie for all the good Backgammon talk and even more for all the good Backgammon. We filmed some of the games so you can head to our Instagram to check it out. You can find and follow us at @Freakonomics and @StevenJDubner. If you are ever looking for a game, let me know. Our email is
[email protected]. Coming up next time on the show, New York just became the latest state to allow assisted suicide or medical aid in dying. We hear from Kathy Hokel, the governor who made that happen. She was inspired by the death of her mother. I watch her lose her own voice physically and her vision and believe to communicate. It was just heartbreaking. We also hear from a death doula about the American way of dying. I cannot live my life to the extent of fullness until I make friends with death. And we hear from an opponent of the new laws. I think it's bad medicine, bad ethics and bad public policy and a grave mistake for society. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com where we publish transcripts and show notes. Special thanks to Melissa Shin, Evan Manners, Mark Sparrow, Dylan Endike, Dennis Hagridi, Sam Anderson and to Amy Servini for her voiceover. This episode was produced by Theo Jacobs with help from Zach Lepinsky and Augusta Chapman and was edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Jake Lumis with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Dalvin Abouwaji, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Alaria Montenacort, Mandy Gorenstein and Pete Madden. As always, thanks for listening. I hate making ugly moves. It's your Danish sense of style that won't allow you. Looks like I have a physical reaction to this play right now. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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