I love books !
They accompany me on my journeys, help me to fall asleep at night, they are an effective way to
turn a beginner into a good backgammon player and - last but not least - look great in my
bookshelves
This part of my homepage therefore deals with backgammon books.
In my
Backgammon Bibliography you will find all backgammon books
ever published in English or German. I only included those books that only deal with backgammon and
not other games as well. I only made an excemption for very old books, where usually backgammon was
discussed together with chess or draughts. I should warn you, that most of the older books
in my bibliography, however, will not improve your strength of play. The knowledge about correct, successful play
has changed significantly within the last 15, 20 years. In particular the availability of strong backgammon
software based on neural networks has added a lot to our knowledge
1) . So
you need to read older books with some care. I will say more about that in the chapter
How to improve and in my
Backgammon FAQ.
The chapter
Recommended Reading will introduce you to some
books that every backgammon player with ambitions should have read.
And if you finally got crazy about backgammon and are desperately searching for sources to buy backgammon books
(and supplies) I'll tell you in another chapter
Where to buy.
As I still intend to complete my backgammon library, I have listed those books still missing in my collection
in
I am searching .... Perhaps you can you help me?
The table below displays how many books on backgammon were published in the course of the previous 150 years; it
also illustrates how the popularity of backgammon has varied over the years.
Each bar represents a time span of ten years, with the exception of the left bar, displaying all publications before 1860, and the right bar,
representing only five years, 2001 until 2006. The length of each bar (left axis) indicates how many books were published in the correcponding
time frame (lower axis).
It's clearly visible that the interest in backgammon hit a peak in the 1930s. Easily identified is also the climax of the backgammon craze
in the 1970s. Later the interest decreased a bit, but seems to be rising again in the 90s. (Keep in mind, that the outer right bar
in only displaying a time span of five years. So the smaller bar is not indicating a decrease in interest.)
1)
JellyFish™, the first neural network based backgammon software was available from 1994 on. At that time is was
significantly stronger than any other backgammon programme and had a deep impact on our understanding of the game.
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Last update: 29th November 2006
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