Why I love and hate DailyGammon.

First: if you love backgammon and if you have good, undisturbed time to play matches to five, seven or even nine points, then Dailygammon is not for you. Go to Backgammon Galaxy or to Backgammon Studio Heroes.

But if you have difficulties regularly reserving an hour or so to playing Backgammon, then DailyGammon offers something special: a clever correspondence backgammon site.

The basic idea of DailyGammon is: instead of playing one match at a time, online, you typically play 20 matches at the same time, making a few moves a day in each match.

Joining DailyGammon

You join DailyGammon by filling out a form with your intended username, your e-mail and a password. If all goes well you’re registered then. If not (like in my case, never received the confirmation mail) you have to send a mail, and then you’re in.

Matchmaking

At any point in time, you can join something like 20 fresh tournaments going on at DailyGammon.

Tournaments are using the KO system over 4 to 9 rounds and each tournament match ranges from 1pt to 21-point. Both Backgammon and Nackgammon tournaments are offered.

Once you have signed up for a couple of tournaments, you have to wait for them to start. Normally this is not a big deal, but after signing up you typically have to wait a couple of days for your first match to start. For a first game you can also create or join an un-rated single match.

All tournaments are rated; DailyGammon uses the FIBS rating system to adjust your rating continuously. Thousands of players are playing on DailyGammon, some very very strong, some very weak. DailyGammon sometimes matches you against a beginner, sometimes it matches you against a very strong expert. This keeps matches very interesting. Currently I’m participating in 16 matches, with opponents ranging from a 1300 rating to a 2100 rating.

Playing

Your normal backgammon day at DailyGammon looks like this: at any point in time, whenever you feel like it, you make a couple of moves in a couple of matches. There are “faster” and slower tournaments, but typically you have about a day to bring a game forward.

The totally cool real beauty of DailyGammon lies in its move prediction system. If, like in correspondence chess that you can play on lichess or other sites, you would make a single move at a time, tournaments would progress very slowly. In Backgammon, many situations are clear with an obvious best moves. Others are not.

Dailygammon ingeniously uses a “medium strength” backgammon AI to predict moves. Suppose you’ve submitted your move. Then the engine will check whether there is a clearly best move for your opponent, and ask you what you would move if she would make this move. This can go on for a number of moves.

If later that day your opponent logs in and reacts to your move, she will play along your recorded replies until she decides to move differently to what the engine expected.

Now if this happens, you get a “rollback”:

DailyGammon will tell you that your opponent moved unexpectedly and the game will continue from her move on. This mechanism can be frustrating as hell (you play until you get a winning position, and then the game is rolled back and your opponent rolls a joker), but it speeds up matches significantly and in my opinion is the real killer feature of this site.

Playing games also means using either a not at all state of the art web UI (compare that to Galaxy…) or an app that is okay but suffers from relying not an efficient API but said web UI. If you’re used to Backgammon Galaxy or state of the art apps, moving is a slow (seconds of wait time) and not very user-friendly affair.

But you get used to that. WIth DailyGammon being the only real correspondence backgammon site, after all.

One more thing: the people on DailyGammon seem to be a particularly nice bunch of backgammoneers. I found the mood on Galaxy much harsher, with people complaining about bad luck being common. Not here.

As I’ve written above, this is the place I’m playing backgammon at. Nice people, you can make as many moves as you like, interruptions by real life are not an issue. You need to get used to context-switching between different games – this can be quite tricky. Supposedly the android app or a browser plugin allows you to add personal comments after a move (“I want to double next move” or so).