Nottingham Backgammon
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Hi,
  Welcome to the Nottingham Backgammon Club. We meet every Monday evening at 9.00pm, except Bank Holidays, at The Horse and Groom, Radford Rd.(See Map)
 The Horse and Groom is a very friendly Inn and offers an excellent choice of ales from a good selection of micro-breweries.
 Our playing format is that we generally play 7 or 11 point matches and we have regular in club tournaments.
  Entry to the club is open to anyone wishing to drop by, come with a friend but if you can bring along a Backgammon Board. Players of all levels are welcome from complete beginner to expert, don't worry if you've never played before there will be someone on hand who will help you learn the game.
 It's worth noting that just as you can now play games in a range of online casinos, you can now play backgammon online. However, these backgammon games often don't have the same atmosphere or fun as when they're played in real life.
 
Nottingham Backgammon
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Nottingham Backgammon
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SNOWIE The premier backgammon computer programme.
GNU Backgammon The open source backgammon programme available free.
BIBA British Isles Backgammon Association.
Bristol Backgammon Club See the site for contact details.
Buy-Backgammon Great Collection of Boards.
The Backgammon Shop For all of your backgammon accessories.
WikiPedia Wikipedias entry on backgammon.
World Backgammon Association News and information from around the world.
Nomads Chess Club Play and learn chess in a friendly atmosphere.
Coventry Backgammon Club See the site for contact details.
Rugby Backgammon ClubSee the site for contact details.
Manchester Backgammon Club See the site for contact details.
Birmingham Backgammon Club See the site for contact details.
Yarnloft For a great selection of designer yarns.
CheckerPlay.com A great site for positions, some great stuff here.
To see the rules of Backgammon How2PlayBackgammon.com
Crisloid Boards Beautiful Backgammon Sets
Under Cover Hand Made Leather Boards manufactured in the UK
 
Nottingham Backgammon
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The Elo rating system: A Short History
 The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as chess and Go. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo (1903–1992, born Élő Árpád), a Hungarian-born American physics professor.

 The Elo system was invented as an improved chess rating system, but today it is also used in many other games. It is also used as a rating system for multiplayer competition in a number of computer games, and has been adapted to team sports including association football, American college football and basketball, and Major League Baseball.


HISTORY

Arpad Elo was a master-level chess player and an active participant in the United States Chess Federation (USCF) from its founding in 1939. The USCF used a numerical ratings system, devised by Kenneth Harkness, to allow members to track their individual progress in terms other than tournament wins and losses. The Harkness system was reasonably fair, but in some circumstances gave rise to ratings which many observers considered inaccurate. On behalf of the USCF, Elo devised a new system with a more statistical basis.

Elo's system replaced earlier systems of competitive rewards with a system based on statistical estimation. Rating systems for many sports award points in accordance with subjective evaluations of the 'greatness' of certain achievements. For example, winning an important golf tournament might be worth an arbitrarily chosen five times as many points as winning a lesser tournament.

A statistical endeavor, by contrast, uses a model that relates the game results to underlying variables representing the ability of each player.

Elo's central assumption was that the chess performance of each player in each game is a normally distributed random variable. Although a player might perform significantly better or worse from one game to the next, Elo assumed that the mean value of the performances of any given player changes only slowly over time. Elo thought of a player's true skill as the mean of that player's performance random variable.

More on the ELO rating system can be found at http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/43892


Reproduced courtesy of Academic dictionaries and encyclopedias
 
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1-1 1-2 1-3 1-4 1-5 1-6
2-1 2-2 2-3 2-4 2-5 2-6
3-1 3-2 3-3 3-4 3-5 3-6
4-1 4-2 4-3 4-4 4-5 4-6
5-1 5-2 5-3 5-4 5-5 5-6
6-1 6-2 6-3 6-4 6-5 6-6

These are the 36 possible dice combinations.

Of these there are 15 opening moves, remember, its not possible to start with a double in backgammon. These opening moves can be categorised as follows; building rolls, slotting rolls, blocking rolls and splitting rolls.
Building Rolls: 5-4: 4-3: 5-2: 3-2.
Slotting Rolls: 2-1: 4-1: 5-1.
Blocking Rolls: 3-1: 4-2: 5-3: 6-1.
Splitting Rolls: 6-2: 6-3: 6-4.
Lovers leap: 6-5.

 More on these later
 
Nottingham Backgammon
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First Internet Backgammon Server

FIBS is the First Internet Backgammon Server, it allows Internet users to play backgammon in real-time against real people (and even some bots). There are players of every conceivable ability logging onto FIBS, from absolute beginners to serious backgammon champion contenders.


Brief history of FIBS

The First Internet Backgammon Server, FIBS, is the earliest online backgammon community. Created by Andreas (marvin) Schneider, FIBS has been in operation since July 19, 1992. Early Fibsters played backgammon using a simple command line interface known as telnet (telnet is still the underlying protocol of FIBS, see the Connecting page for more information). The first graphical interfaces to FIBS appeared in 1994, with FIBS/W for Windows users and MacFIBS for Macintosh users. Today, FIBS players can choose from a number of excellent graphical interfaces, making FIBS backgammon a more natural and enjoyable experience. Originally located in Germany, the FIBS server moved to Sweden in 1993, and moved again in 1996 to its present location in California, where it runs on a Linux system managed by Patti Beadles. Although now abandoned by its creator, FIBS continues to develop through the work of volunteers. All the interfaces, RepBot, TourneyBot, FIBS Board and this website you're currently reading are all the works of others independently contributing towards the FIBS community. The FIBS archive has the original announcement for the launch of FIBS plus other bits and pieces.

For more information on FIBS visit www.fibs.com

Reproduced courtesy of Fibs.com
 
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Ratings Calculator

 Player APlayer B
Rating (Before the match)
Experience (Before the match)
Length of the match
WinnerA win : B win :

Rating (After the match)
Variation


Note : if the experience of a player is over 400 you can leave the corresponding field blank.

For comments or suggestions, feel free to contact me : fhochede@nordnet.fr (francois on FIBS).
You can also download this tiny (22Kb!) standalone Windows application here: FIBS Rating Calculator
Reproduced courtesy of Fibs.com
 
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Ratings explained

Basics

If you win, your rating goes up. If you lose, it goes down.

If you beat someone who is better than you, you will get more points than beating someone who is worse. Similarly, if you lose to someone who is worse than you, you will lose more points than if you lost to a better player.

For example, a player rated 1500 plays a player rated 1925 in a seven point match - if he loses, he loses 2.28 points, but if he wins he will go up 8.31 points. How to work this all out is shown below.

Over time you will reach a rating where the points you gain for winning games is roughly equal to the points you drop for losing games - at this stage, your rating is broadly representative of your ability.



How it actually works

Your gain/loss is dependent on three things - difference in rating, the match length and your experience. For now, let's ignore experience to explain the thinking behind the system, but we will return to this right at the end.

The difference in rating can be converted to a theoretical winning probability. This is expressed as a number between 0 and 1 and is calculated with the following formula:

Winning prob. = 1-(1/(10^((YOU-HIM)*SQRT(ML)/2000)+1))

where YOU=your rating, HIM=his rating, ML=match length

Each match has a value in terms of points - this formula is much simpler:

Match value = 4*SQRT(ML)

The points you gain or lose depend on the result of the match:

If you win: Gain = Match value * (1 - winning prob.)

If you lose: Loss = Match value * (winning prob)

As an example, suppose a player rated 1500 plays a player rated 1925 in a seven point match - he has according to the formula a 0.2151 chance of winning. A seven point match is worth 10.58 points (square root of 7 multiplied by 4). If he loses, he loses 2.28 points (0.2151 * 10.58), but if he wins he will go up 8.31 points (0.7849 * 10.58).

Lastly experience - every time you play a match, regardless of result and score, your experience points are increased by the match length. To get players to their 'correct' level fairly quickly, the gains and losses of new players are multiplied by the following formula until they reach 400 experience points, after which the normal gain/loss is used:

New Gain/Loss = (Old Gain/Loss) * (5 - (experience points after the match/100)

So, if we look at the example above again, if the 1500 player is playing his first match against the 1925 player (an initiation of fire!), his gain/loss would be multiplied by 4.93 - so if he won that first match he would go up by 40.95 points!

Back to Calculator


Reproduced courtesy of Fibs.com