"Extreme Gammon"

[spielberg]

Phil Simborg recommends this as better than Snowie, GnuBG, BGBlitz etc. Given his calibre I've investigated and it certainly seems the best of the bunch.

Picture comparing playing strength to speed of analysis:




The study (very recent too) upon which the picture's based is at bgonline.org

For US$50 this is a bargain. Software's at eXtreme Gammon

[wintom]

The study was published by the developer of eXtreme Gammon, so it is up to you if you want to fully trust the outcome. My impression is that eXtreme Gammon is definitely faster than the other bots and that it's playing strength is at least equal. But there is much more to XG than speed and strength! It analyses your game in the background while you are playing. It doesn't evaluate it's own play as perfect i.e. when the rollout or deeper analysis shows that your move is better than the one initially chosen by the software, your move is marked as an outplay. You have a bunch of different playing modes to choose from e.g. the free mode where you get the analysis results right after you moved your checkers or the iron man mode, where the program doesn't show you anything not even the pipcount and the analysis result is automatically stored in the player statistics without you beeing able to cancel it, so you cannot cheat yourself. You can also perform batch analysis and match rollouts. And it is very easy to record live matches. The list is endless. The software is full of features and new brilliant ideas. The only thing that annoyed me after I bought it was the fact that I hadn't done that much earlier!

Greetings,
Thomas

[roadkillbooks]

I can recomend this as well.  You can also download it for free from this page: http://www.roadkillbooks.com/Backgammon.aspx

If you shoot me an email after you download I give give whoever some instruction on how to use the more advanced features. Its quite easy to use.  Like countries there are things I like and other things I dont. But due to speed, i use it more than Snowie. Somewhere I have a couple of positions that came up with very different equities.  The stsa this prpgram keep are amazing as well.  The price also drops $5 on like the 5th day of the free trial.. it goes back up to $50 at the end though.

roadkillbooks

[Tomawaky]

I have it and found it great 

[Miles42]

I bought the version for the IPAD and after an up grade by apple  it crashes to the point it almost unusable.  Maybe I will get the PC version.

[PillowFighter]

I find XG to be a great tool and I have used it to analyze a ton of matches from playing at fibs, gridgammon, backgammon ace. Now the trick is how do you extract useful information from all these matches? Going through all these analyzed matches manually is rather tedious so this is where Backgammon Studio comes to the rescue. You can have your own private database ($2 a month which i think is reasonable) where you can upload up to 2000 XG matches which is then made searchable. You can then get answers from all kinds of questions about your play. In which position type do I make the most errors?



What type of play do I struggle most with?



How is my cube performance?



And you can compare your values with top international players as the above image suggests.

And a lot of other interesting statistics. You can also play through past errors in many different ways to see if you are likely to make the same mistake again or if you have improved your play enough to avoid them.

And as you can read from my other postings here there is a lot of other fun stuff to explore! Registration is free and you can enjoy a lot of free content (based on 2800+ matches played by top ranking players) competing with other players for highscores in a lot of different challenges (think of them as training programs for different aspects of backgammon). Good fun!

Best regards,
TP