During its boom times, backgammon enjoys a symbiotic relationship with celebrity. When the game is in vogue, celebrities look fashionable playing it — and when the famous are seen playing, the game becomes all the more popular. Most of the public figures seen at backgammon really did enjoy playing the game, and often the board or table featured is actually their own, but in some cases a backgammon board is merely a scenery prop, and a good one.  The board can provide a focal point for a composition while checkers, dice and cups can be arranged or manipulated for effect. Portraits of celebrities at a table can often project anything from jaunty playfulness to intellectual intensity.

The inherently egalitarian quality of game play where players sit across a table in competition is particularly good for couples portraiture. Backgammon gives subjects something to do with their hands (sometimes pointedly sporting an engagement ring or wedding band), and the interplay of eyes can speak volumes. A couple might look at each other, or the board, or some combination of the two, suggesting giddy romance, scrappy rivalry, or placid domesticity.

And as with celebrities, so with commercial products. A cigarette company or liquor brand will want to associate itself with activities that are popular in their target audience, and in return the wide spread of commercial advertisements heightens visibility of the game and drives participation. Notable examples of print advertisements are interspersed with the celebrity photos for a richer sense of the backgammon’s image over time.

If you’re in doubt whether a photo is genuinely candid, try looking at the hands. The artful slant of a cigarette, knuckles curled beautifully around a dice cup, fingers poised to snatch up the dice or move a checker — real life is rarely as neat as all that. In some images, the celebrities are posed in flattering compositions, meticulously clothed and lit for glamorous effect — but if you look twice, you’ll see that the backgammon board is actually awkwardly balanced on a knee or armrest. And of course nonsensical checker arrangements (or seating arrangements!) often make it obvious a genuine game isn’t underway.

These galleries were inspired by Bill Davis’s Celebrity Backgammon pages on the Chicago Point website, but I’ve taken a chronological approach I hope will convey the distinctive flavor of the backgammon scene over time. This page is also less comprehensive. I’ve selected photos based on the fame of the individual, the centrality of backgammon to the image, and the overall quality of the image, and with a secondary interest in showcasing the style of backgammon sets in the various eras. I’ve generally limited myself to a single image of each celebrity, with a few exceptions. Also, a few backgammon personages are included, when they have had exceptional visibility to the general public. Finally, I’ve not repeated the many celebrities appearing on the covers of Las Vegas backgammon Magazine appearing elsewhere on this site.

It should be acknowledged that these galleries reflect a local sense of celebrity, limited to the Western incarnation of backgammon most salient to players in the United States. The NEBC is based in Boston, MA.

Albert Steg

This page is best viewed on a desktop browser screen or tablet.

Mouse-over or tap individual pictures for captions.

Click on images for full-size view.

Documentation of America’s first big backgammon boom is almost entirely limited to the activities of the wealthy. Backgammon appearances in newspaper articles and photos are limited to the “Society Pages.” There seems to be no newspaper record at all of public backgammon activities such as tournaments or community clubs, so it is difficult to say how much the rage for the game was limited to the private gentlemen’s clubs and exclusive dinner parties of the day. The one thing that is clear is that backgammon became an absolute obsession in Hollywood, where the game could serve both as a perfect pastime for whiling away time between scenes on a movie set and as an exciting gambling activity for stars with money to burn.

Hollywood studios exerted strong control over their actors’ public images, as these stars signed long-term exclusive contracts with them that made them in effect “properties” of their employers — which could be damaged by scandal or the wrong kind of notoriety. Most of the photos in this section are publicity shots provided to the dozens of Hollywood fan magazines of the day with titles like Screen Play, Motion Picture, Picture Play, Silver Screen.  While there were undoubtedly some notorious backgammon aficionados among the stars (Joan Crawford, Harpo Marx, Harold Lloyd, Cary Grant, to name a few) it’s far from certain that all those pictured at a table actually played regularly. Candid photos are few, and we are decades away from a time when the paparazzi, driven by tabloid sales, would frequently catch the famous at play unawares.

The 1940’s-50’s saw backgammon making little news, with no innovative products, books or articles appearing on the scene, though gaming companies like Lowe, Drueke, Cardinal, appear to have maintained a thriving market for their backgammon sets. The game also persisted in celebrity portraits and advertising throughout those decades, suggesting that the game enjoyed steady popularity even during its quieter periods.

Backgammon’s second American boom is a much broader public affair. While Prince Alexis Obolensky promotes the game among the jet-set, with lavish tournaments in exotic locales, Hugh Hefner makes backgammon part of his influential “Playboy lifestyle” and boards proliferate in bars and discotheques. For the first time, backgammon clubs appealing to the general public proliferate across the country, and major ‘Open’ and amateur tournaments enjoy money-added backing from major casinos and hotels. Dozens of new books are published (and some from the 1930’s hastily re-printed). This is the era of popular money-play backgammon, as top-level sharks like Joe Dwek are featured on 60 Minutes and “pigeons” in any local chouette can imagine they’re competitive with the best.

A wider range of celebrity is seen at a backgammon table in this era.  In addition to the Hollywood star, we have athletes, rock stars, politicians and socialites — as well as broader ethnic participation. The images, while still often staged or posed, more frequently capture the famous during actual play, whether at organized backgammon tournaments or behind the scenes at sports venues, concert halls, and movie sets.

Backgammon experiences another lull in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, as poker dominates the gaming sphere and attendance at local clubs and national tournaments plummets. Around 2005 NEBC attendance occasionally drops to the single digits for monthly tournaments, and weeklies are a thing of the past. When the game begins to rebound again in the 2010’s, there is a new national organization, the USBGF promoting local clubs and national events, and there are widely available neural-net programs like eXtremeGammon and GNU enabling players to get a true evaluation of their play, and a powerful new tool for self-improvement.  Backgammon sheds much of its reputation as a hustler’s gambling game and enters a new phase as a mind sport, as excellence in play can be recognized independent of tournament results — and players gain a realistic understanding of where they stand in the pecking order of their local chouette. Finally, the global Covid-19 lockdown spurs a massive proliferation of online play, as tournament directors move their local clubs online to platforms like Discord for virtual competitions and players in backgammon-starved regions can readily get in the game.

During this period, the very notion of celebrity is broadened and democratized. Reality shows and audition programs like American Idol supplant scripted shows featuring big-name professionals. The internet has proliferated and ushered in the age of social media, where self-minted celebrity is available to anyone with a web-cam and the chops to build an audience hungry for what they have to offer. Established cultural icons can manage their own online fame via Instagram and Twitter (now X), and the new phenomenon of social influencers can have an outsized effect  in promoting backgammon when they take a shine to the game.

Most of the images on this page have been freely circulating on the internet for many years, while a few of the press photos are scans from my personal collection. You can usually discover the source of photos by simply copying them to your computer and performing a google image search on them.

Send comments, questions, and suggestions to Albert Steg at info@nebackgammon.org