The Backgammon Chronicles: A Pro's Adventures on Tour Volume 1
The Backgammon Chronicles: A Pro’s Adventures on Tour is a lush, two-volume, full-color cornucopia of gambling stories, character sketches, historical essays and tournament drama that takes the reader on an insider’s odyssey through backgammon’s last whirlwind decade––with its author, one of the game’s elite competitors, as guide.
Introducing you to the game’s stars even as he narrates his clashes with them in a score of exotic venues, Robert Wachtel frames the action against an overview of the events and crises that have defined contemporary backgammon: the advent of the artificial-intelligence programs and their virtual extinction of the game’s traditional role as a gambling recreation; the ecstatic birth and untimely death of online play; the burst of investment and enthusiasm brought to the game by the poker boom; and current trends: the outreach of Western backgammon culture back towards the game’s birthplace, the Middle East; and the efforts of the federations of the major nations to establish a viable global community.
About the Author
A chess master who collected a PhD in philosophy in his late twenties, Robert Wachtel is a rare breed: an accomplished game player with a helping of literary brains to match his computational brawn. Currently ranked world #11 on the peer-rated survey “The Giants of Backgammon” and Grandmaster 2nd class by the Backgammon Masters Awarding Body (BMAB), Robert has been one of the game’s elite players for the last 40 years. He is the author of two advanced treatises on backgammon endgame play––In the Game Until the End (1993) and In the Game Until the End Volume II (2014), and an acclaimed collection of online and journal articles that wittily describe the evolution of modern backgammon from the early 1990s to the present day. Robert was the editor of the US Backgammon Federation’s flagship magazine, PrimeTime Backgammon, from 2011 to 2019. He is also the author of The Language of Backgammon: A Player’s Dictionary, a companion volume to The Backgammon Chronicles.