Backgammon Coaching – A little history behind the project
“Welcome to Backgammon Coaching!”
This is the first thing you are going to hear or read when you visit our website, YouTube channel or any other related pages.
At BackgammonCoaching.com, we want you to feel welcome. Visiting the site, you enter a place where you can feel free to ask anything without fear of judgment, free to share your opinion, and not be afraid to articulate your moves and thought process behind any backgammon position. We are here for you – to answer your questions, explore the inner workings of your mind, and to connect the dots between ideas.
A Short History of Backgammon Coaching
The inception of the Backgammon Coaching idea dates back to September 2021 where I, Zdenek Zizka (known as “ZZ”), went for a fairly ordinary walk to get some fresh air and to mull over some creative ideas. This was one of them. The moment the idea sprang to mind, I could never let it go. Shortly thereafter I began sharing it with my closest friends, and together we started pulling together some goals for the project. The original plan was to have an official backgammon curriculum – much like at university – where every key concept is explained clearly and understood by the viewer. I wanted to create a platform comprising predominantly video material, where a user can access multiple video courses which guide them step-by-step from a beginner to a world class player. Sounds simple? It’s not!.
What we intend to do is create a backgammon curriculum that leverages modern thinking, which puts to rest outdated approaches (overly focusing on rules and functional descriptions of positions), which can be confusing to many players.
How many times have you read explanations of backgammon positions that you could not understand? How many times have you seen explanations that simply describe features of the position (“We have a 3-point board, that is why we should hit”, “You should make the 5 point because you should always make the 5 point”, or, “It is never right to leave the anchor”).
This “rule-based” approach is, unfortunately, often wrong. It may help to a certain degree – it may work as a shortcut that beginners and intermediates can easily follow – but it is not dogma. To truly understand backgammon, it is crucial to explain why the right move is correct, so we can avoid making the same blunders repeatedly. We want to put an end to simply “describing features” of positions, in favor of actually explaining them, usually by reference to the various ways different moves can pan out. .
In late-2021, we started work simultaneously on the website, YouTube channel, Facebook and Instagram pages. By early 2022, we were finally ready to launch our project, starting by posting regular ‘Position of the Day’ videos on social media.
The First Phase of Backgammon Coaching
It’s now March 2022. BackgammonCoaching.com went public just a few days ago at the end of February.. So far, our first phase of deployment introduces the ‘Positions of the Day’ videos Each ‘Position of the Day’ video introduces a backgammon problem for the viewer to solve. ZZ provides commentary and shares his thinking process with you, whilst demonstrating variations by moving checkers around on screen. The goal of each video is to improve your ability to parse a backgammon position and to ensure consistent mental stimulation with backgammon content. Each position represents a discrete concept, problem or unorthodox principle (tactical or strategic) to think about.
The more you understand, the more you can figure out over-the-board when faced with unfamiliar positions. Besides the ‘Position of the Day’ YouTube videos, we are also offering Zoom-based coaching lessons, where you can work together with your coach on specific aspects of the game individually. We offer match – and position-specific analyses to help improve your ability to analyze your own games. We supply you with the right reasoning, empowering you to understand your game better and minimize your chances of making the same mistakes.
Our First Stage will be deemed complete once the word gets out, once we have a great community on Facebook and Instagram, and once you want more! When this happens, we plan to launch phase 2!
The Second Phase of Backgammon Coaching – What to Look Forward to
In Phase 2, we’re planning something big! We will be releasing even more videos, creating vlogs from live tournaments (to share the buzzing atmosphere of a real-world backgammon tournament). Anyone that has been knows that spending time at a tournament is like meeting close friends you never knew you had, all the while playing your favorite game with them. Does it sound like a dream?
Well, now it can be a reality! 🙂
We want to get more people involved in live tournaments, so we can have more people playing and loving the sport. You can be a monogamist and still want to share your love of backgammon with more people. After we succeed in getting more people playing the most beautiful game in the world, we need to give them a chance to learn the game easily. Learning anything as complex as backgammon without being given the right tools is extremely difficult – this is where our courses come to play.
Backgammon video courses will give everybody the opportunity to learn the key ideas, common moves, reference positions and frequent patterns that occur during the game. The most important component to our courses will be the in-depth exploration not just of their backgammon game, but the detailed understanding of how to think in a better way. Learning backgammon in this way could be understood to be like a tool to develop the correct mindset with which to make decisions.
Life is like Backgammon – full of decisions that can turn out badly even when they were probably right, and vice versa. You can be rewarded for a bad play and punished for a good one. But, just like with life, the one who works smartest will win in the long run.
The Third Phase of Backgammon Coaching – The Ultimate Goal!
As you might notice from our videos, we like to keep you engaged. We will throw little surprises in here and there to keep you on your toes. And we won’t stop doing it, so we stick to our slogan: when you think there is nothing else coming up… keep watching! 🙂
ZZ
Professional Backgammon Coach & Player