Online Tournaments versus Live Tournaments

There are many different kinds of backgammon tournaments whether you play live with another player right in front of you or online in front of a computer. Other than these, the other obvious differences between these two modes of tournament play are physically moving backgammon checkers, rolling the dice, and doing the pip count manually.

If you compare these two even further you'll find out that that both will have a lot of things to offer. Let's take a look at some of the not so obvious differences between live tournaments and online tournaments.

The first difference between live and online tournaments is the method of cheating used. When you play live players have a lot of nasty ideas on how to cheat. The good news is that since you are sitting right in front of your opponent you can detect whether your opponent uses loaded dice, makes illegal moves, or any other form of cheating done live. This has made cheating in live tournaments quite rare.

There is no way you can immediately detect that a backgammon player is cheating online. Cheating during a game can come in the form of using computer aids while playing a match. A good idea is to have your matches recorded if your gaming site supports that feature. You can then counter-check the moves against a backgammon computer program and see if your opponent played like a computer.

Another issue that comes up when comparing these two tournament platforms is the randomness of the dice rolls. There are players who complain that a tournament site's random number generator is bias. Some complain that the rollouts show too many doubles for their opponents. In reality, dice rolls are entirely random whether you roll them or generate them online. That is exactly the element that makes backgammon unique to other strategy games, a random set of results on two dice.

Moving forward to strategy, there really isn't any difference when you play live or online. The only difference that one might find is that you don't know who it is you're really playing against when you play online. You might know certain players when you play live and may have become familiar with their style of play. So you can adjust your strategy a bit depending on who you're playing against live.

You won't have to worry about illegal moves when you play in online tournaments. You won't even have to worry about the pip count online, it's always there on your screen. This is where live tournaments take a slight backward step since you have to do the pip count manually and you have to constantly watch for unintentional illegal moves made.

Backgammon tournaments are great experiences whether you play them online or live. Both have benefits you might like to enjoy and keep your game sharp every time.