Intermediate Player level

What "Intermediate" 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.

An Intermediate is a member whose play sits in the band PR 11.3 to 13.3 — a little over two hundredths of a point given away per decision. This is the largest level in the club, and it is the level of the solid club player: somebody who knows the openings, understands what a prime is for, and loses mostly to the cube and to the positions where two plays look the same.

Why a target, and why not every Intermediate member plays the same

Each of the 152 Intermediate members 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 Intermediate members are the same player. One sits near 11, another near 13; one is a little sharper on the checkers, another a little looser with the cube. Each was given its own fixed sharpness within the level, so that meeting GG Schroeder is not the same as meeting GG Constantinou.

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. An Intermediate member gives away a little over two hundredths of a point on every decision that Guru does not. Over a match that gap tells — but it does not decide everything, because the dice still exist.

Put in rating terms: an Intermediate member starts at 1500, Guru at 2300. On the club's rating scale, that difference gives the Intermediate member an expected chance of winning of about 28 % in a single game, 17 % in a 3-point match, 11 % in a 5-point match and 8 % in a 7-point match. The longer the match, the less the dice can do for the weaker player. Those are the odds against the very top of the club; against members of the levels below, they turn around.

How an Intermediate member is tuned

The engine underneath every member is the same one: GNU Backgammon, which reads every position at full strength. An Intermediate member 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 an Intermediate member plays like one, that is because the measurement said so, not because somebody thought it looked about right.

Where they go wrong — and where they don't

An Intermediate's mistakes are the mistakes of a competent player: not the obvious blunder, but the quiet one — the wrong checker in a priming battle, the safe play when the bold one was right. In clear positions, races and bear-offs they are nearly clean, because at this strength people are. There is a hard ceiling on how much one decision may throw away, and no gifts when they are ahead.

The cube at Intermediate level

Checker play and cube handling are tuned separately, because in people they come apart. An Intermediate doubles more or less on time and takes reasonably, but misjudges the close ones: the market losers, the takes at a bad score. Their cube decisions follow the same "sees it slightly wrong" model as their checker play, fitted to how players of this strength really handle it. Against them the cube is no longer free points — but it is still where the difference is made.

Is this your level?

If you have read a book or two, know the standard openings by heart, and find that you lose matches you felt you were winning, this is very likely your level. It is also the widest field in the club, with the most rivals to get to know.

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 Intermediate range and you carry an Intermediate 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 152 members below are the heart of the club.