At the semi-finals of the 54th Backgammon World Championship Open in Monte Carlo, the audience witnessed a great plot twist.
Kazuki Yokota, who was considered as one of the most successful backgammon players in the whole world, and Galen Hall, an “ordinary” player who was not known in the field of backgammon, were playing against each other.
Well, Hall was not famous for playing backgammon, but most importantly for his success in poker: more than $6.8 million tournament earnings, a WSOP golden bracelet and a victory in the PokerStars PCA. You can easily say that he is an outstanding poker player. On the top of it, he showed his remarkable skills and characteristic backgammon strategies during the BGWC semi-final in Monte Carlo against Yokota.
You might presume that he already had practiced playing backgammon for a long time in order to play against such an experienced player, Yokota. However, interestingly, Hall learned how to play backgammon three months prior to the aforementioned tournament while he was on a business trip in France, thinking it would be “fun”.
After practicing playing backgammon with his business partner, Hall decided to use backgammongalaxy.com’s post-match solver in order to figure out which moves the computer favors over the others, and why. He mentioned that he considered backgammon similar to a problem or a puzzle: “It’s a fun little puzzle to try and see what the correct move is and then see if you can reason your way backward to the principles of why that’s the correct move, and then you grow your understanding of the game that way.”.
At the semi-final match, commentators like Phil Simborg and Michel Lamonte first considered Hall’s playing style as “unorthodox”, which Hall immediately noticed: “I was moving the pieces with two hands... so they’re kind of like, ‘Oh, this guy is moving the pieces with two hands. He doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s made a couple of checker blenders. He must be some kind of moron.’” However, towards the end, Simborg and Michel seemed truly interested in the way Hall played backgammon. And in the following quote, you can understand how surprised and amazed Simborg was when he heard that Hall’s prior experience in playing backgammon was limited to three months before he played against Yokota at the semi-finals: “Three months? Are you kidding? I’ve never seen anybody this good in three months at backgammon. This guy is brilliant.”.
All in all, Hall is considered competitive and impressive even though he lost in his last game with Yokota, who calculated the moves more correctly and played almost perfectly, having the skill advantage instead of pure luck.
When asked about his strategies, Hall stated that he endeavored to create volatility during the game, and he played highly aggressively by putting a lot of pressure, using the doubling cube: “My overall strategy was looking for spots where I could create a lot of volatility and I was really erring on the side of being aggressive, erring on the side of putting pressure and trying to turn up the ball. It was fun.”. Moreover, he remarked that he generally has a lot of fun and feels no pressure while playing games, just focusing on playing that game: “When I’m playing games, I basically never feel any stress, but I feel alive. You know what I mean?”.
You can see the full article here, which was written by Jeff Walsh on Aug 14, 2023: https://www.worldpokertour.com/news/galen-hall-shows-guts-and-brains-at-backgammon-world-championship/
