Beginner level

What "Beginner" means here

Every member of the club carries a Level of Play, and the level is not a mood or a slider. It is a measured playing strength, expressed in the number the backgammon world uses for exactly that: PR, the Performance Rating. PR is simple to state. Take every decision a player makes in a match, ask the engine how much each one cost compared with the best play, add it up, divide by the number of decisions, multiply by 500. Lower is better; zero is perfect.

A Beginner is a member whose play sits in the band PR 20.6 to 23.6. In plain terms: on an average decision they give away a little over four hundredths of a point — small enough that a single move rarely looks wrong, large enough that over a match it adds up to a great deal. It is the level of somebody who knows the rules and has played a fair amount, and who has not yet learned where the game is actually won.

Why a target, and why not every Beginner plays the same

Each of the ten Beginners has a target PR of its own inside that band. The target is what that member is tuned to average over many matches — not a promise about the next one. Two things follow.

First, no two Beginners are the same player. One sits near 21, another near 23; one is a little sharper on the checkers, another a little more careless with the cube. Each was given its own fixed sharpness within the level, so that meeting GG Mizzi is not the same as meeting GG Stoica.

Second, a single match will swing above and below the target, for a member exactly as it does for you. A match full of easy decisions produces a clean PR; a match full of close ones punishes everybody. The level holds as an average, and nothing is done to force one match into the band — no correction, no "making up for it" after a good game, no error budget being spent. That was tried in an earlier build and taken out, because people do not blunder on a schedule and neither should they.

How far from the top

The club's strongest player, GG Guru, plays the engine's best move every time: PR 0. A Beginner gives away roughly four hundredths of a point on every decision that Guru does not. Over a match that gap decides most games — but not all of them, because the dice still exist.

Put in rating terms: a Beginner starts at 1100, Guru at 2300. On the club's rating scale, that difference gives the Beginner an expected chance of winning of about 20 % in a single game, 8 % in a 3-point match, 4 % in a 5-point match and 2–3 % in a 7-point match. The longer the match, the less the dice can do for the weaker player. Those are the odds of a Beginner against the very top of the club; against a Casual player or an Intermediate they are a great deal better.

How a Beginner is tuned

The engine underneath every member is the same one: GNU Backgammon, which reads every position at full strength. A Beginner does not get a weaker engine. What changes is how the member looks at what the engine sees: through a little noise, so that when two plays are close, the wrong one can look right. How much noise, and how often the member is sharp rather than careless, is set for the level and then adjusted per member.

The settings were not guessed. They were fitted to how real people at this strength actually err — around 200,000 decisions by approximately 100 real players, from world class down to PR 15.9 — and then confirmed in engine-graded test matches before the level shipped, played by hand after that, and re-measured every time the cast changes — by the time the doors open, every level will have thousands of graded games behind it. When a Beginner plays like a Beginner, that is because the measurement said so, not because somebody thought it looked about right.

Where they go wrong — and where they don't

A Beginner's mistakes fall where a human Beginner's fall: in close positions, where two plays look alike and the right one is not obvious. In a straight race or a bear-off, where the play is clear, they are nearly clean — because people are nearly clean there too. They will not make an absurd move; there is a hard ceiling on how much one decision may throw away. And when they are clearly ahead, they will not suddenly hand you the game with a needless blot. Weak, yes. Fake, no.

The cube at Beginner level

Checker play and cube handling are tuned separately, because in people they come apart. A Beginner is, in Jay's playtest words, scared to double and takes everything: they will let a clear double go by, and accept cubes they should refuse. Their cube decisions run through the same "sees it slightly wrong" model as their checker play, fitted to how weak human players really double, take and drop. Which means the cube is where you beat them — and also where, if you are honest, most players at this level lose to each other.

Is this your level?

If you know the rules, play regularly, and still find that the doubling cube mostly happens to you, this is a fair place to start. Play here and you should be winning more than you lose; if you are not, the review after each match will show you where the points are going.

Your own level is not a label you pick. When you start, the badge beside your name says provisional. As your career goes on it fills in with your average Level of Play, measured the same way the members are: play in the Beginner range and you carry a Beginner badge; play better, and it moves. Try one level below yours for pleasure, and one above it to learn.

Beat them, and they are yours

In Career Mode, beat a member in a tournament or a league and they are unlocked for good — on your account, across every career you ever start. From then on you can sit down with them for a friendly whenever you like, or just say hello. The ten members below are where most careers begin.