Benjamin’s Musings

Backgammon

After my dad taught me to play backgammon, I started to enjoy it. I wasn’t any good, really, but I’d play my dad (he played online backgammon too, so he had more experience than me, and usually beat me) and my sister with some regularity. Once I played a friend who played backgammon tournaments – obviously expecting to do quite poorly. That was the first time I ever saw a doubling cube. I had no idea what they were. When I asked, his eyes lit up. He’s something of a history of backgammon buff as well as a backgammon player, and began to wax poetic about the doubling cube. He asked if we could use my computer and he started showing me images from old magazines and things like that.

Basically, what he told me was that the doubling cube hadn’t always been a backgammon staple. It’s a tool that allows the players to keep track of the stakes of the game. Apparently, backgammon wasn’t really common in the United States for a while, but part of the reason it regained popularity here (starting in the late 1920s) was a rule that allowed players the possibility of doubling the stakes of the game before rolling, on their turn. When my friend started telling me this, I realized that online backgammon does indeed allow you to do it, I just hadn’t really though about why. But it is part of standard “modern” backgammon rules.

The reason we can pinpoint the entrance of doubling into the rules so precisely is thanks to two books: Hoyle’s Games (R.F. Foster) and Modern Backgammon (Grosvenor Nicholas). The first was published in 1926 and does not mention doubling for backgammon at all. The second was published in 1928 and does mention doubling and automatic doubles. So, obviously, the doubling rule must have risen to prominence, enough to be considered standard, somewhere in those two years.

Originally, parlor matches were used to keep track of doubling. But the doubling cube – first introduced in New York City backgammon clubs around 1929 – is the more efficient, specific version.

My friend got so wrapped up in showing me old images from Colliers and pictures of previous ways to keep track of doubling (parlor matches, backgammon matches, a pointing device) that we never actually played a game – a shame, but probably healthier for my pride.