What are the odds of a backgammon?

evilari · Joined: 14 Jun 2007 Posts: 17

I have been playing backgammon for longer than I can remember, yet only twice have I witnessed a game where a player lost and still had a checker left on the bar. Of course, I’ve seen tons of games where people lose a backgammon with checkers in the opposing home board, but on the bar is really rare. Someone told me that there is a 7% chance of losing with a checker on the bar, but this seems high to me. Does anyone know if that’s accurate?

teklanika · Joined: 14 Jun 2007 Posts: 6

I would be interested to know the answer to this too—looking back at my statistics I saw that I have played more than 7000 games on FIBS and this has only happened to me once. That’s a lot less than 7%!