Here is an excellent course of 2-minute lessons offering up memorable, easily-applied advice for beginning players.

1. Don’t bury your checkers
2. Don’t run if you’re behind in the race
3. Don’t play too safe. Develop
4. Don’t get trapped
5. Don’t make candlesticks! Play flexible.
6. Don’t leave direct shots
7. Don’t give your opponent too many good rolls
8. Don’t play aggressively when you’re weak
9. Don’t play passively in the opening game
10. Don’t attack without ammunition
11. Don’t move without a game plan
12. Don’t think the 7-point is the strongest

Anytime you perform a google search on some backgammon topic or question, you’re likely to wind up at Tom Keith’s incredibly packed website. Want to see a list of all the Monte Carlo Champions and Runners-up? Galore! Lessons (over a dozen of them) on the various methods of counting pips? Galore! Quizzes?  Annotated games? Rules and Variations? Galore! One of the most generous and significant things Tom has done, though, is that he mined thousands of 1990’s posts to the USENET backgammon forum rec.games.backgammon for the most useful, substantial, interesting posts on a variety of topics and archived them under topical headings for easy access. While Galore’s web design is very 1998, and you’re never sure exactly where you are at any given moment with regard to the rest of the site,  it’s lots of fun and super instructive to explore. (The Home Page pictured is actually not the best place to start for browsing articles on playing topics: this is.)

The Backgammon Learning Center (BLC) is the brainchild of prominent backgammon promoter/teacher Phil Simborg and  Perry Gartner, President Emeritus of the US Backgammon Federation. It provides aspiring backgammon learners with teachers who give individualized instruction, live or via the internet.  The BLC has developed materials using a structured approach to mastering the various aspects of the game, and vets its teachers to ensure they are effective in delivering these lessons. BLC instructors also  tailor their lessons to the needs and skill levels of their students. Pricing and teacher selection are geared toward the student’s playing level. The BLC boasts an exceptional stable of international backgammon luminaries including Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochy), John O’Hagan, Bob Wachtel, Steve Sax, Frank Talbot, Dirk Schiemann , and our very own NEBC champion, Marty Storer, among many others.

The BLC is also expanding into the backgammon equipment business, and will be updating their website with these products in the near future.

Backgammon Studio is included among the “Play Online” sites, but it’s as a personal training ground that it really shines, offering tools available nowhere else. Firstly, Terje has made it a mission to get XG transcription files of every match streamed from major tournaments around the world, and he welcomes submissions from individuals who record their own matches at such events.  As a result he has many thousands of matches in  the site database. Based on these files,  you can view lists of players ranked by average PR, which is interesting.  But not only can you then review any of these matches play-by-play . . . you can play from the perspective of either player and treat the entire match as a quiz, seeing you your own decisions would stack up  in terms of cumulative PR rating! -And of course that means you can also re-play any of your own matches as your older, wiser self and see whether you’ve actually improved.

You can also set up your own match database, uploading match files from other sites like Backgammon Galaxy or the BG Studio playing room  . . . and BG Studio will analyze them and allow you to quiz yourself on your errors, automatically grouped by theme!  Or you can simply quiz yourself on dozens of thematic “Training Tracks” like “Homeboard Hitter!” and “Too Good?” that pull thematic positions from the millions in his enormous match database.

These are a few reasons why Terje Pedersen calls his site “The Swiss Army Knife of Backgammon.” While the site can be a little bewildering to navigate, part of the reason is that there are so dang many fantastic resources there. It’s well worth the effort to make this your backgammon gym.

Bill Robertie’s backgammon blog is a great way to keep your mind engaged with backgammon on an ongoing basis between NEBC tournaments. Bill posts a couple times month on anything backgammon: an interesting doubling position; newly available backgammon equipment; chouette rules; tournament tips. Once you’re there, you won’t be able to resist clicking into the various blog-post categories at left. And it must be said: very, very few backgammon sites are this nicely designed: it’s a pleasure to spend time here.

Connecticut Equipment-maker Crisloid has put together a quite an entertaining online backgammon glossary! It is quite up-to-date (when did people start referring to a “banana split” play?), and includes some whimsical terms (“Bertha”) as well as some regionalisms (our very own “Barabino”!). This is a fun resource to page through now and then — and you might even learn something useful.

The new USBGF website offers a terrific variety of learning resources for the beginning and advanced player alike. Chris Bray’s “Learning Curve” offers a weekly workout on an instructive position, Neil Kazaross hosts a collaborative “Online Match” feature where participants try to beat the teacher by deliberating on each move and cube decision together; and Phil Simborg’s 200+ video lessons cover an enormous range of topics, tagged by theme and guest collaborator

Some newsletters come too often. They’re padded out with boilerplate material and aren’t particularly newsy — because they come out on a regular schedule whether there’s news or not.   Bill Robertie avoids that by only sending out a newsletter when he’s actually got news: a review of a compelling new book; a remembrance of a backgammon giant who’s passed; the discovery of an obscure 1975 Paul Magriel interview.  Consulting Robertie’s newsletter page we see only five missives from calendar year 2018.  Subscribing to this newsletter is a no-brainer for anyone engaged with the world of competitive backgammon. It’s free, and it’s fascinating.

While there’s a good deal of free backgammon tutelage to be found on the internet, Backgammon Village Magazine offers an incredible value for the serious student of backgammon. The $125 “Lifetime Subscription” option will give you access to more high-quality backgammon instruction than you could reasonably get through in 5 years of intense weekly study, even if they weren’t continuing to add material. Consider that by joining you’ll get access to the entire run of 59 articles that were edited into Walter Trice’s Backgammon Boot Camp (a $40 value alone).  By subscribing, you’ll get full access to similar series of articles by a terrific stable of top thinkers in backgammon. How about “The Master Plan” by Bill Robertie (22 articles); “Sticks and Stones” by Stick (60 articles); “Advanced Angles” by Steve Sax (125 articles) or “On The Road with Jake” by Jake Jacobs (179 articles!?!).  You can pick and choose the columnists you find most compelling and enjoy a range of material focused on checker play, cube play, match-score strategy, etiquette, psychology, backgammon travelogue reporting . . . and that’s just the articles!  There are also “Tutorials” by Phil Simborg, “Quizzes” by Gregg Cattanach, annotated Match Transcriptions, Interviews with established and rising stars . . . it goes on and on.  If you aren’t sold, you can get a 3-month subscription for just $30 and see for yourself.

PrimeTime Backgammon is a slickly-produced quarterly publication so full of interest you’ll have a hard time digesting it in the 3 months before the next one arrives.  A typical issue will contain an article or two on some aspect of backgammon play, a trenchant commentary on a transcribed match, interviews with prominent players or influential organizers, reviews of faraway  tournaments you might think about attending, loads of tournament results . . . and lots of full-color photographs. Electronic access to the entire PrimeTime archive (going back to 2010) is included with a ‘Premium’ USBGF membership ($60 annual, $150 for 3 years) — download the full run onto your tablet reader and you’ll never be bored on an airplane again.

The 2+2 website is mostly devoted to poker, but they host other topics for conversation and Bill Robertie moderates a very hospitable backgammon forum there.  Perhaps because this forum is not populated by a lot of snarky backgammon know-it-alls, and because Bill Robertie fosters a calmly intelligent level of discourse, the tone of discussion here is very friendly and welcoming to newer players.  What’s more, you’re likely to get a pithy reply to your inquiry from Robertie himself, and that’s a sweet deal.

Jacob “Stick” Rice’s BG Online forum has been the center of online backgammon discussion in the 2000’s.   Here you’ll find in-depth theoretical discussions, personal accounts of tournament experiences, quirky checker-play scenarios, arguments over the meaning and value of error ratings, and endless debates over “official” organizational policies promoted by the USBGF and backgammon federations abroad. If you post a genuine backgammon question, there’s a good chance you’ll get replies from published backgammon writers and other wizards of the game. The fully searchable archive of past posts, by author or keywords, is a precious resource for backgammon competitors and historians alike.

The site has suffered some technical difficulties in 2019.  If you are having difficulty accessing the forum, you might try a variety of browsers to see which will work best on your machine. (Firefox on a Mac seems to work okay . . . )

‘RGB’ was a thriving USENET backgammon forum in the 1990’s and is still up and running with a nice graphical interface. The number of participants active there has dwindled considerably over time, but it’s still a good place to talk backgammon. Moreover, the forum history is still searchable, so you can often find a lot of answers without having to post a question yourself.