Rigged or extreme Bad luck?

[socksey]

Thank you for the excellent analysis, dorbel!  I'm assuming, with reason, that, of course, it IS an excellent analysis.     It was very nice of you to take the time.     RG is fortunate if he heeds what you are saying.    

Ever one of the fence posts......................socksey

[RiggedGammon]

This post from riggedgammon is quite typical of many that I have seen over the years. TMG attracts more than their fair share, I don't know why that is. As so often the complainant has been playing for  years and claims to be intelligent. We may assume that both these claims are correct. "Playing for years" means that, in the opinion of the claimant, he is a pretty good player. When I lived in Greece I played numerous games with men who had been playing for a lifetime. We played tavli and about their skills with fevgo and plakoto, two of the three variants I can say very little, although they seemed pretty hot to me. As for their backgammon, they were universally appalling, with the best of them capable of playing at a level in western terms of weak intermediate. This isn't because they are unintelligent, it is because they play in a vacuum, entirely unaware of the way that the game has advanced in recent years, first with the teachings of Magriel, Robertie, Woolsey and others, then with the neural network bots of the last ten years. Unable to understand why they get buried by a decent modern player, they attribute it to luck or, as in this case, to rigged dice.
The fact that riggedgammon invites us to get out a board and play these games to convince ourselves that luck or cheating must be responsible is a bit of a giveaway. We can do better than that by using a computer program to analyse them. Gnu is of course the most common these days, while the equally powerful Snowie is my weapon of choice for this. In case anybody doubts how accurately a bot like this is capable of playing, Nack Ballard, arguably the best human player on the planet thinks that Snowie would be his partner of choice over any human player in the world.
I took the time and trouble to put the first three games that rg shows us into the computer.
They make for very interesting reading, but I just know that riggedgammon isn't going to like what they show.
The first game is very short. RG only makes three checker plays, mishandling one of them badly, then misses two clear doubling opportunities before losing his market and cashing the game. Not surprisingly, Snowie rates this performance as Novice, its lowest rating.
In game two RG has more opportunity to impress and his snowie rating rises to the beginner level, but  there is still one huge and amateurish checker blunder before he incorrectly passes an admittedly very tough cube.
The third game is the longest of the three and RG gets backgammoned after taking a slightly premature cube early in the game. Predictably perhaps he butchers the ensuing positional struggle, making some startling blunders in fairly straightforward technical positions and you have to say that he deserves it. In this game too his play is only beginner level and his opponent makes hay while the sun shines.
This is not to belittle RG in any way. He has no frame of reference with which to evaluate his own plays and thus attributes his inevitable heavy defeats to bad luck and/or cheating. We can safely assume that the rest of his games display the same level of play, but all is not lost Mr RG! Start to play at fibs, have fun, play in the tournaments and join the excellent fibs league. Learn to play, but please dont feed the vultures who flock round the feeding tables on TMG. It's a happy hunting ground for Scandinavian experts who would I imagine pay to get to your table! Best of luck!

Just saying thanks again dorbel, all has been appreciated. Very helpful