GG Goldstein

Daniel Goldstein learned the game in the Manhattan clubs of the seventies and spent four decades on a trading floor by day and at a board by night. He wrote a memoir of that world which people still quote back at him. He plays every day from an apartment on the Upper West Side, and to anybody under thirty he is a name they have not heard.

He also owns Goldstein Gaming Supply Ltd., supplier of Goldstein Boards, the classic green-backed boards found in most of the major casinos. It is the sort of business that suits him: traditional product, serious customers, very little need to explain what it is for. Goldstein knows the professional backgammon world almost as well as he knows the old New York one, and counts Valentino Barone among his good friends and regular training partners.

Forty years of high-stakes play left him with an endgame that younger members cannot shake and a habit of calling all of them kid. Nothing hurries him. What he is doing the whole time is waiting for a cube to arrive at the wrong price, and he has never lost the trader's pleasure in taking one. The stakes have never particularly frightened him either. The Whale room feels less like a promotion than somewhere he was eventually going to end up.

He played on the original GamesGrid, and he played Barone there, which cost him a figure he still declines to name. He came back because Barone asked him to, and does not pretend there was more to it than that.