Xbot and Paul Magriel — the X-22 Story

Q: What's the best Paul Magriel book to read?

Backgammon (Quadrangle / NYT Book Company, 1976) — his canonical text on positional play. Still in continuous print since 1976. The recommended-first-purchase book for any serious backgammon student. Some readers prefer Magriel's collected NYT columns and his magazine writing as a supplement, but the 1976 book is the foundation.

Q: Did Magriel have any connection to chess?

Yes. Before backgammon he was a competitive junior chess player at the national level. His mathematical training and chess background informed his analytical approach to backgammon throughout his career — the cube-action mathematics that underpin modern competitive play are formally similar to the kinds of decision-under-uncertainty problems that strong chess players are trained to handle. ---

Xbot was an independent neural-network backgammon bot operated on GamesGrid by Paul Magriel under his lifelong handle X-22 (rendered as X22 in the GamesGrid client). It existed alongside the in-house GG bot family but was not built by GamesGrid Engineering — it was Magriel's own project, and his decision to run it on GamesGrid in particular was emblematic of the platform's cultural place in the 1996–2008 era of competitive backgammon.

To understand why Xbot mattered, you have to understand who Paul Magriel was. This page is the biography of Magriel as backgammon's central figure of the modern era, the origin of his X-22 nickname, and the documented history of Xbot on GamesGrid as preserved in the platform's archived FAQ.

For the in-house bot family (Forever, Raccoon, Beaver, Otter, Weasel, Chipmunk, Tutor, MrHyperBot), see the GG bot family page. For the broader engine lineage, see Bots & AI.

X-bot — character render evoking Paul Magriel's X-22 handle as it appeared in the 1996–2008 GamesGrid client. — X-bot · operator handle X22

1. Paul Magriel — a brief biography

Paul David Magriel was born in New York City on 1 July 1946 and died in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 5 March 2018. He was, in the assessment of most serious students of the game, the central figure of the modern backgammon era — the player and writer who took the game from its Studio 54 glamour phase into a discipline with formal positional theory.

Magriel was a mathematics prodigy. He attended New York University, studied mathematics through to graduate level, and lectured in mathematics at the Newark College of Engineering in the late 1960s. Before backgammon he was already a known figure as a chess player — competitive at the national junior level — and as a contributor to game-theoretic problems in mathematics journals.

In the early 1970s he switched his competitive focus to backgammon. Within five years he was the dominant figure in the game.

2. The 1978 World Backgammon Championship

In 1978 Magriel won the World Backgammon Championship in Las Vegas — at the time the most prestigious tournament in the sport and the title that carried the most weight in the wider gambling and games community. The win cemented his reputation and gave him the platform for the journalistic and analytical work that followed.

The Las Vegas event was held at a moment when backgammon was at its second commercial peak — the Studio 54 era, the Hugh Hefner / Playboy Magazine backgammon column, the Madison Avenue tournaments. Magriel's championship win positioned him as both the strongest player and the most articulate explainer of the game in a way that no one else of the era combined.

For the full historical context of the second backgammon boom, see the history page §III ("The second hype: Las Vegas and Studio 54, 1970–1985").

3. Backgammon (1976) — the canonical text

Magriel's book Backgammon, first published by Quadrangle / The New York Times Book Company in 1976, is the single most influential strategy text ever written on the game. It pre-dates his world-championship win and, in some sense, made the championship possible — by the time Magriel arrived in Las Vegas in 1978, every serious competitor in the room had read his book.

The book's content is positional theory. Magriel was the first writer to formalise the value hierarchy of points (the 5-point, the bar point, the 4-point), the strategic categories of openings, the structural concepts of priming and back games, and the analytical framework for evaluating positions independent of the specific dice that produced them. The vocabulary modern backgammon uses for these concepts — much of it Magriel's — is the vocabulary of his book.

Backgammon has stayed in print continuously since 1976. It is the recommended-first-purchase text for any serious beginner in 2026 just as it was in 1980. No subsequent book has displaced it.

4. The New York Times backgammon column (1977–1980)

From 1977 to 1980, Magriel wrote a weekly backgammon column for the New York Times. The column ran in the Friday games section and treated each week's installment as a single annotated position, working through Magriel's reasoning at decision-point granularity. The columns are some of the most concentrated positional-analysis writing in the game's literature.

The column was suspended in 1980 when Magriel's life shifted toward Wall Street trading and the demands of his commercial chess- and backgammon-related work, but the archive of those weekly columns remains a reference for serious students.

5. Wall Street, "The Human Computer", and the trader years

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Magriel worked as a derivatives trader on Wall Street, primarily in options pricing and risk arbitrage. His mathematical training made the transition natural — the equity calculations behind backgammon cube actions are mechanically similar to options-pricing calculations under uncertainty — and the trading career gave him the financial independence to continue his backgammon work without commercial pressure.

It was during these years that the gambling press dubbed him "The Human Computer" — a nickname that captured both his mathematical reputation and his playing style. The nickname appears widely in backgammon and gambling literature of the period.

6. The X-22 nickname

Magriel's lifelong backgammon handle was X-22 (or in client-handle form, X22). He used it throughout his playing career and used it as his login on GamesGrid and other contemporary platforms.

The widely-cited origin in backgammon-historical sources: in the early 1970s, around the time Magriel was transitioning from chess to backgammon competitively, he developed (or was involved with the development of) an early backgammon-playing computer program named X-22. The program was an exploratory project — well before TD-Gammon, well before the neural-net era — and would have run on the kind of mainframe time-sharing systems that an NYU-affiliated mathematician had access to in that period. Magriel adopted the name as his own playing handle in tribute to the program, and the handle stuck for the next four decades.

The exact details of the X-22 program — its architecture, who else if anyone worked on it, what backgammon strength it actually achieved — are not well-documented in archive material we have access to. Magriel himself gave somewhat varying accounts of the program's specifics in interviews over the years. What is uncontested is that the X-22 name pre-dates the playing handle, and that Magriel adopted the handle as a tribute to that early computational work.

7. Xbot on GamesGrid (1996–2008)

The Xbot project on GamesGrid was Magriel's commercial-era backgammon bot — a neural-network player he operated on the platform during the 1996–2008 GamesGrid era. The 2003–2004 archived FAQ describes Xbot as "a neural-network backgammon player, that is willing to play for small money stakes" and notes that Xbot "plays at a very high level."

What the original FAQ documented:

Operator: Paul Magriel (handle X22 on GamesGrid).
Access: GamesGrid members could invite Xbot to matches.
Match types: Up to 9-point matches. Public matches only — spectators could always watch.
Stakes: Small money stakes — the bot was a paid match opponent, distinct from the free in-house GG bots.
Concurrency: Like the GG family, Xbot played multiple simultaneous matches; the available indicator in the client turned off when Xbot was at capacity.
Speed control: Same in-chat convention as the GG bots — /tell Xbot slower or /tell Xbot faster adjusted the bot's per-move pause.

The architecture of Xbot — what neural-network framework it ran, what training corpus, what evaluation depth — was not documented in detail in the public GamesGrid FAQ. The description "neural-network backgammon player ... at a very high level" is the extent of the technical detail the platform shared publicly.

A documentation caveat. The 2003–2004 archived Xbot FAQ contains a section on rating fluctuation that appears to have been copy-pasted from the MrHyperBot FAQ template — the specific numerical rating range cited (1797 to 2109, a 312-point swing) is identical to MrHyperBot's published range, which is statistically improbable as a coincidence and likely indicates the template was reused without updating Xbot's actual numbers. Xbot's true operational ELO range on GamesGrid is therefore not reliably documented in the archive material we have access to.

8. After GamesGrid

When the original GamesGrid platform wound down (acquired by GamesAccount in 2008, fully dark by 2010 — see the history page), Xbot ended with it. Magriel continued his backgammon work through the 2010s — teaching, writing magazine articles, playing in major events, and serving as an analyst at world-championship-level tournaments.

He died in Las Vegas on 5 March 2018, age 71. The obituaries published in the New York Times, Backgammon Galaxy, and the wider gambling and games press documented him uniformly as the defining figure of modern competitive backgammon.

9. Why Magriel and Xbot mattered to GamesGrid

The presence of Paul Magriel as an active operator on the GamesGrid platform — running his own bot, accepting small-stakes matches from members, observing the play of the broader community — was a material commercial validation of the platform during its 1996–2008 era. He had every other major server to choose from (the original FIBS, GammonEmpire, Play65, the various money-play platforms), and he chose to operate Xbot on GamesGrid.

That choice mattered because Magriel was, by every measure available, the most credentialed figure in the game. He was the World Champion. He had written the textbook. He had written the NYT column. He was "the Human Computer." When he ran a bot on GamesGrid, that decision said something about the platform's seriousness — both to other top-tier players considering where to spend their time, and to the wider commercial-backgammon community.

The 2026 GamesGrid platform inherits that lineage with respect and without overclaim. Magriel is not coming back; Xbot is not coming back; the relationship was a product of its era. But the encyclopedia preserves the record, and the new platform is being built in the same spirit — a place where serious players want to be, where strong bots are part of the texture, and where the game's intellectual seriousness is treated as the operating principle rather than as marketing copy.

Frequently asked questions about Paul Magriel and Xbot

Who was Paul Magriel?

Paul Magriel (1946–2018) was the dominant figure in modern competitive backgammon. He was the 1978 World Backgammon Champion, the author of Backgammon (1976) — still the canonical positional-strategy text — and the New York Times weekly backgammon columnist from 1977 to 1980. A trained mathematician (NYU), he later worked as a Wall Street derivatives trader. He was nicknamed "The Human Computer" in the gambling press of his era.

Why was he called X-22?

The widely-cited backgammon-historical account: in the early 1970s Magriel developed (or was involved with the development of) an early backgammon-playing computer program named X-22, decades before the neural-net era. He adopted the program's name as his own playing handle and used it throughout his subsequent career, including as his GamesGrid login X22. The exact technical details of the X-22 program are not well-documented; what's uncontested is that the name pre-dated the handle.

What was Xbot?

A neural-network backgammon bot operated by Paul Magriel on the original GamesGrid platform (1996–2008). It accepted match invitations from members for small money stakes, up to 9-point matches, in spectator-visible public matches. Architectural details (the network framework, training data, evaluation depth) were not documented publicly in the GamesGrid FAQ.

Was Xbot one of the GG family bots?

No. The GG family (GG Forever, GG Raccoon, GG Beaver, GG Otter, GG Weasel, GG Chipmunk, GG Tutor) plus MrHyperBot were built by GamesGrid Engineering and run by the platform. Xbot was independent — built and operated by Magriel personally, hosted on the platform as an outside operator.

Is Xbot still available?

No. Xbot ended when the original GamesGrid platform wound down (2008–2010). The 2026 platform does not include Xbot. Magriel died in 2018; there is no contemporary operator continuing the project.

What's the best Paul Magriel book to read?

Backgammon (Quadrangle / NYT Book Company, 1976) — his canonical text on positional play. Still in continuous print since 1976. The recommended-first-purchase book for any serious backgammon student. Some readers prefer Magriel's collected NYT columns and his magazine writing as a supplement, but the 1976 book is the foundation.

Did Magriel have any connection to chess?

Yes. Before backgammon he was a competitive junior chess player at the national level. His mathematical training and chess background informed his analytical approach to backgammon throughout his career — the cube-action mathematics that underpin modern competitive play are formally similar to the kinds of decision-under-uncertainty problems that strong chess players are trained to handle.