Backgammon is Life: Humility
Last year I played in a Tournament on the American Backgammon Tour and had a fabulous time. While watching the finals match of the Advanced Consolation Flight, I observed an exchange that prompted me to write this article. Obviously, they were both excellent players since they had to win an awful lot of matches to get through the consolation bracket. As it happened, it was a man playing against an exceptionally attractive woman. He was behind several pips bearing off in the Crawford game. Then his friend, who was watching, kibitzed, “One set of doubles, and you’re back in it.”
Now his opponent appropriately stopped the clock and she stated strongly, “We need to address this right now.” But he was having none of it, thinking her objection unreasonable and began berating her. It seemed to me that he was upset that he was being beaten “by a girl”. He’d underestimated her ability and she had just outplayed him, so in his arrogance, he began taking it out on her. He felt humiliated, but didn’t understand it was a humiliation of his own making. At least, that’s the way I saw it as an outside observer. If only there was some kind of software program that we could input our behavior into and it would give us a humility or arrogance ranking.
Humility
I’ve been playing backgammon for over 45 years. One of the things that has struck me over the years, is how backgammon is an amazingly helpful metaphor for life. Not only that, playing this game has made me a better person overall. I know what you’re thinking, “Dude, get over yourself, it’s just a game!” Backgammon is far from “just a game”. Playing competitive backgammon has had such a profound effect on my life, that I actually referenced the game in my Health Care Directive (Living Will).
“Religion doesn’t inform my healthcare decisions at all. When considering whether or not to employ a specific treatment, I believe the numbers based on the statistical analysis of possible outcomes. Backgammon is a more reasonable metaphor for my approach to life than any religion. When my health is throwing me a doubling cube, I have to seriously consider whether it’s time to drop.”
For me, a big part of living a happy and fulfilling life is humility. But, I approach humility differently than most people. Being humble isn’t about sulking around like a sad dog that has been beaten into submission, although I do feel that way sometimes after having faced some especially stiff competition at an American Backgammon Tour event. No, a state of perfect humility is simply when my view of myself matches others’ views of me. People see me in basically the same way I see myself. If these two images are different, then I’m living in a fantasy world. The bigger the difference, the more extreme the fantasy.
Arrogance Inhibits Growth
You know that member of your backgammon club who makes the same mistakes over and over. He constantly annoys everyone with loud complaints about how lucky his opponents are. “OMG! Perfect roll after perfect roll. How can anyone win against this guy’s luck? Why, he’s Evil Incarnate!” And when you try to calmly point out an alternative play, or explain how he didn’t need to leave that joker, he balks, scoffing at the mere suggestion that he doesn’t know how to play this simple game.
I used to be that guy. In my youth, I had no idea of the nuanced aspects of backgammon. Part of my misunderstanding was the fact that I just hadn’t played enough, maybe only a couple of thousand games. I hadn’t seen enough of those jaw-dropping parlays. The fact of the matter is that in backgammon, just like life, anything can happen. All you can do is the best you can and leave the rest to the capriciousness of Fortuna, the Goddess of Chance.
Disillusionment is a Requirement
And that’s where humility comes in, because “the best you can” needs to get better. And you can’t get better until you realize that you’re not really that good. As long as I was arrogant enough to think that I didn’t need to study, the rest of my buddies at the Backgammon Club saw me as a fish. I was just going to lose in the weekly tournaments and hand them money in the chouettes. And that is the very definition of a “lack of humility.” Unfortunately, my arrogance could not be extinguished until I was disillusioned.
Disillusionment sucks. It’s painful, and pain hurts, so we avoid it. But with that pain comes personal growth. On the other side of that raw realization is freedom. Once I had accepted the objective truth of my skill level, I no longer had to pretend to be something I wasn’t. Maintaining that façade took an awful lot of wasted energy. But now I could use that energy to actually learn the skills that I lacked and understand the concepts that had been escaping me.
Humiliation is Sometimes a Gift
You also know the arrogant guy (it always seems to be a guy) at the office. He’s always bragging about where he’s been, what he’s done, what he can do, and how much money he makes, all evidence to the contrary. He talks a good game, but there’s no “there” there. He’ll have a modicum of success. But sooner or later he is found out. His colleagues stop trusting him and stop working with him. They tire of being used by him as he takes credit for their work and finally, he gets his comeuppance. As the saying goes, if you lack humility, you will be humiliated. And disillusionment is the key to humility.
Disillusionment Can Be a Spiritual Experience
Disillusionment is difficult to experience without pain. We each tend to overestimate our own abilities in almost anything. This has been shown in psychological experiments[1] over and over. And depending on our tolerance for pain and the level of attachment to our false self-image, we can live in this fantasy for a long time, enduring the pain of humiliation over and over again until we quit or accept the fact that we’re “not all that.” It’s kind of like being a drug addict. If you look at the Twelve Steps of Recovery in Narcotics Anonymous, the first step is “1. We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.” This is a critical step because a drug addict can’t recover until they realize that they have a problem with addiction. The evidence is in how unmanageable their life is; their friends and family abandon them, they lose their job, and finally their car is repossessed. Trust me on this, drug addicts have a high tolerance for pain and extremely grandiose illusions of being able to ‘handle.’ But sooner or later the consequences of life on life’s terms catch up to them. The bigger the illusion the harder they fall. If you wanted to rewrite that first step for backgammon, it would look something like, “We admitted we were powerless over the dice that our game had become unmanageable.”
Objectivity Can Help
Fortunately, in backgammon we have an objective tool that we can use to tell us our strengths and weaknesses without exception. Extreme Gammon© can analyze our play and tell us exactly how good we are. It’s a digital mirror of sorts that we can use to find humility as well as new insights into how to play the game. Even so, I’ve sometimes shown positions to my friends where XG has pointed out the correct play and they have simply denied the result. “That can’t be right!” they exclaim in horror. Letting go of previously held beliefs can be hard, even impossible at times.
Nobody Deserves to Win
When we’re on the receiving end of a particularly bad beat, it just seems wrong. Most of us remember the times when we were just about to win it all. We were already experiencing the thrill in our head when victory was abruptly snatched away by a joker of epic proportions. “I played it perfectly, and then I was just punished.” We explain. And our five year-old inner child screams, “NO FAIR!” It’s situations like these that prompted Ralph Stowell, the current patriarch of our club, to adopt the catch phrase, “You can’t make this shit up!” Sadly, there is no such thing as “deserving to win”. The Dali Lama is not luckier than Charles Manson for having lived a good life. Clean living has no effect on dice. To illustrate, here’s a bad beat that I put on someone else. He didn’t deserve to lose. In fact, he played well. But he couldn’t overcome the dice sequences which were so extraordinary that I have vowed never to complain about dice again.
Unbelievable Parlay
Consider this position from the 2017 Wisconsin Backgammon Championships. I was playing in the Advanced Division against a local
Wisconsin player named Mark Milkie. Mark, playing black was ahead 6–3 in a 9-point match and had a 6–1 to play. He has the tough choice that we all face in life and over the board, “Should I stay or should I go?”. He can run and resign himself to getting gammoned 100% of the time, or he can stay and risk the backgammon and the match. He decided to stay at which point I became a 90% favorite to win the game and to get almost even. I also gammon him 68% to go ahead in the match. And not only that, 18% of the time I backgammon him to win the match outright. That’s a lot of pressure, and I would have made the mistake to cut and run which was a massive blunder.
But Mark stood his ground and correctly played outside 13/7 11/10. And of course, I rewarded him by rolling a 3–1 hitting him and leaving two shots which he promptly hit and put on the bar. That led to this position.
Now that’s a sad enough story as it is, but it doesn’t stop there. I’m only a 2/1 underdog from here so I’ve still got chances. Where there’s life, there’s hope as they say. He can’t double me out because at this score I have too much equity to drop.
And this is where the unbelievable parlay began. I came on with an 3–1 and he rolled a 6–5. He had to hit me with the 6 because he couldn’t afford to let me make the ace-point. If I make his ace, I become a 2/1 favorite. I respond with an 1–1 hitting him and making his ace point. Now he has his bar-point open and I own his ace-point, at least temporarily. As soon as I throw a six, I’m going to have to leave.
Mark comes in with a 6–5 and scoots out to the 14-point. He can’t clear his blot on the 7-point because he needs it for additional contact if I happen to run out with a 6, which I promptly roll. The classic containment game was on, and what a game it was. He hit me off his ace-point and I came in with a 6–1 bouncing right back out. He’d hit me on the outside and I’d enter on the ace immediately. He just kept hitting and my dice had no respect at all for his 5-point inner table. All tolled I must have thrown a dozen 6–1’s in the parlay.
Even though Mark played it perfectly, it was as if I could do no wrong. Back and forth we went. My dice were relentless. Mark was a perfect gentleman, but his patience was wearing, and his irritation was palpable. It’s not like I could take any credit for my play. When you only have two checkers, they kind of play themselves. Almost every move is forced and those that aren’t have few options. In the end, it came down to this position.
Mark just slumped. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He remarked under his breath. But he kept his composure and found the best play, 18/15 11/5.
What else was there to do but watch 6–6 come out of the chute. One in, two off, backgammon, match. Mark offered me his hand and the obligatory congratulations and promptly disappeared. I never saw him again that weekend. That’s understandable after such a brutal loss.
To be backgammoned by two checkers on the bar against a prime is simply insane, something like 2,000 to 1 against. No one believes me when I tell the tale, but it happened. And I went on to win the tournament, my first major tournament win. Sure, I got lucky, but when anyone complains about my dice, I just smile and say, “We all have to play the dice we get.” That’s why we love this game. That’s why we hate this game. That’s life.
[1] https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/studies-in-swollen-heads-what-causes-overconfidence.html
