Vic Morawski: Hi, I am Vic and today we are introducing you to the game of Backgammon. We would like next to look at the situation where you are simply bearing your checkers off and you don't have an opponent to worry about. There are just a couple of things to remember as you are bearing checkers off. Note, in this situation blue has already a number of its checkers borne off. The first thing to remember is whenever possible, if you roll a number that allows you to do so, it is almost never wrong to take a checker off directly. So if you roll a three, take the checker of the three point, don't move one down from the six. Don't move something down from the five. It's usually better to take one directly off if you at all, can. Now you will notice, blue has some gaps here that blue would rather not have and there are priorities here.

Suppose in this situation, I have a two to play. Well, there are two productive ways that I could play a two. First of all, this would not be good, because it just stacks them up, but here I have got the option of filling in a point where there is no checker or of evening out the distribution on to a point where there is one, but there is only one and the priority here since you can miss entirely if you roll a four is if you are rolling a two in this situation and you cannot take a checker off because a two point is open here to fill in gaps during the bear off, if you can.

Now if, let's suppose there is no checker on the one point and blue has one to play. You can again fill in from there. There might be situations where the best thing you can do is to even out the distribution, that's a third order priorities. So it's better first to fill in gaps and then to even out the distribution if you need to and next we will talk about some aspects of bearing your checkers off when you have your opponent in your home board.

To watch the other segments in this video series or for How to videos on almost any other topic, visit monkeysee.

com.