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Backgammon Bibliography        
  Author Cooke, Barclay
  Title Paradoxes and Probabilities
  Subtitle 168 Backgammon Problems
  Cover Cover
  Year 1978
  Pages 184
  Publisher Random House, New York
  Binding Hardcover (with dustjacket)
  ISBN 0-394-50126-8
  Language English
  Remarks Cookes style of play is typical for the 70s and not state of the art. Still the positions are very interesting to analyze. I recommend to read Jeremy Bagai's "Classic Backgammon Revisited" before, where all errors of Cooke are marked and re-analysed.
  From the same Author Championship Backgammon, 1980
Backgammon, The Cruelest Game, 1974
  Book Reviews "[..] In his time, Cooke was viewed by his peers as one of the leading authorities on the game. Reviewing his solutions with the aid of modern theory and our silicon friends, Snowie and JellyFish, it is staggering just how much our understanding of the game has progressed, though in retrospect I suppose this is not that surprising.
Cooke should not be overly criticised for his recommended solutions. He was brave enough to admit that he didn't know the right play in many situations." – Chris Bray, in What Colour is the Wind?, p.79

"An infamous work. The oft-repeated conventional wisdom has been that nearly a third of the solutions are wrong, but this is a significant understatement. A third of the solutions are badly wrong; well over half are wrong to some degree. Why then, does the book live on while so many others artifacts of the backgammon boom of the 70's have since long faded into obscurity? Partly because the problems, misanalyzed or not, are so interesting." – Jeremy Bagai, in Classic Backgammon Revisited, March 2001

"This is almost a "must have." 168 problems, most of which are very interesting. Current thinking is that solutions to about a third of them are wrong, but the analysis gives very good insight into how Cooke, a first-generation world class player, thought about backgammon." – Marty Storer, rec.games.backgammon, May 1992