Which man to run?
I often run into situations where either:
1. I have 2 fairly advanced back men and will be popping one into the outfield with something like a 5 or 6. I find that I often pick the wrong one and can't find rhyme or reason to it.
2. I have men on the 24 and 22 and roll 65.
Is anyone aware of any material with good reference positions and discussions for these and similar situations?
If it's any assistance in terms of the sort of material that would help me, I'm about a 6 PR and 2k ELO on the new Galaxy
5 Replies
It's a little hard to generalize, but for question 1, you often want to disconnect the checkers (so keep them more than 6 apart) so as to give your opponent fewer immediate double hits and longer term attacking chances, unless there's a blot in your opponent's board in which case you don't mind the extra attack risk so much, so it's nice to have the checkers connected for return shots and the possibility to make the outfield point.
Edit: I should also mention that duplication stuff also tends to matter here, so yeah, it can be complicated and hard to generalize.
For question 2, you could ask yourself if you run 22/11 and then if you got to play an extra 2 somewhere, how happy would you be to play 24/22? If you would be pretty happy to do that, that's a pretty strong argument to play 24/13 in the first place. Also if you opponent is split in your inner board, then a builder on the 11 might not be worth much since it get hit a lot, so that's another argument for playing 24/13.
Thanks, Z, for your thoughts :-) I'm going to have to play around with these some more and see if I can get a better handle on it
Yeah, for question 2, 24/13 often seems the superior move compared to 22/11. There are specific situations where you'd want to play 22-11 (you already have a checker on your 11-pt or you need a builder to make your 5-pt for instance), but it seems more the exception than the rule I would think.
If it’s early in the game there is another argument for 24/13 for question 2. In the early to middle part of the game, stripping the midpoint usually is not a great idea. Often you need to do so anyway to hit an outfield blot, but keeping spares on the midpoint usually is helpful. Playing 24/13 gives you an extra spare, and thus an extra potential builder that you can use, without stripping the midpoint.
