Board Game Arena

Why there is ridiculous Elo-dump-system for volunteer matches but not luck analysis which evaluate games and win. Even Bridge tournaments there is already dealed cards (same cards in different tables) which allows to test how skillfull different players are. If Bridge has took luck this seriously why it is not possible to took in Backgammon too. My idea is to compare how many moves both player has took and this ratio will give value for victory. Every passive move is valuated 3.5 per dice, or average 4.08 per dice, instead of 0. Even first player advantage could take count this luck analysis.

GnuBG will perform luck analysis on a game, presumably there are other programs that will do it too, but to make it native to BGA would require a fair bit of work that, frankly, most people would ignore.

Your comparison to bridge tournaments is a false equivalence on several levels:

• It only applies to organised bridge tournaments, not individual games of bridge.
• In bridge, once the players start a hand there is no randomness / luck factor. In backgammon there is randomness as part of every player turn (aside from a declined double). To counteract this, in backgammon you would have to have a tournament with a generated series of dice rolls that every table followed, to attempt to eliminate the luck factor.
• Further, in a bridge tournament, the status of "vulnerability" (impact of wins/losses in previous hands on future hand scoring) follows a determined sequence, not the results of the players on the previous hands. To counteract this in backgammon, you would have to treat each game in the tournament as separate with no use of the doubling cube, or otherwise change the handling of the cube e.g. no limits on doubling, open-ended match length rather than a defined match length - and hence no Crawford rule.

Still no response why there should not be luck-valuation in Backgammon.

Paddles wrote: ↑07 August 2026, 02:21 GnuBG will perform luck analysis on a game, presumably there are other programs that will do it too, but to make it native to BGA would require a fair bit of work that, frankly, most people would ignore.

Your comparison to bridge tournaments is a false equivalence on several levels:

• It only applies to organised bridge tournaments, not individual games of bridge.
• In bridge, once the players start a hand there is no randomness / luck factor. In backgammon there is randomness as part of every player turn (aside from a declined double). To counteract this, in backgammon you would have to have a tournament with a generated series of dice rolls that every table followed, to attempt to eliminate the luck factor.
• Further, in a bridge tournament, the status of "vulnerability" (impact of wins/losses in previous hands on future hand scoring) follows a determined sequence, not the results of the players on the previous hands. To counteract this in backgammon, you would have to treat each game in the tournament as separate with no use of the doubling cube, or otherwise change the handling of the cube e.g. no limits on doubling, open-ended match length rather than a defined match length - and hence no Crawford rule.

Why you just dont say you agree with me instead you response all this irrelevant results. You are wrong, my compransion is correct, my point was Bridge players took luck seriously.

Backgammon and Bridge traditionally have different approaches to luck.

The final of the World Championahip is Best of 19 to mitigate luck a bit. But the whole tournament is in KO format and game lengths in previous rounds are much shorter. Luck is part of tournament play.

You can play best of 7 or best of 19 here on BGA just like any regular BG tournament would use it.

Other tournaments like the UBC (Ultimate Backgammon Championship) mitigate luck by playing short 7-point matches. You get 1 point for winning and 1 point for better PR. Thus, playing correct the moves earns you 1 point independent of lucky rolls.

For obvious reasons this cannot be implemented on BGA.

The OPs request to count the numbers of move to evaluate luck is so inferior to existing methods that I do not need to further comment on it.

Axaddettu90 wrote: ↑19 August 2026, 22:45 Why you just dont say you agree with me instead you response all this irrelevant results. You are wrong, my compransion is correct, my point was Bridge players took luck seriously.

Because your comparison between bridge and backgammon is fundamentally flawed. (And sending me more than one private message asking me to post that I agree with you is both pointless and unwelcome.)

I've already posted the reasoning for why I think your approach is wrong. If you're going to refute it, you need to point out the flaws in my response, not just say "you're wrong, I'm right".

As I said previously, there are existing mechanisms for measuring luck in backgammon, and I described one that you can already use if you want to see the impact that luck had on your game. I haven't examined the statistical rigour of the luck calculations in GnuBG, but on first glance they seem a lot better than your proposed calculation. But if someone was going to spend some time on making changes to BGA Backgammon, I'd prefer they focus on some of the existing bugs and recommended enhancements as more useful to all players, with luck calculations as a far lower priority.