r/backgammon•
ChrisTToast

What do you think the best "overall" roll is?

Or put another way, if you didn't know anything about the board state but needed to pick a roll, what would you pick?

Double 6 is an obvious candidate but would be a fanning number on most homeboards, plus has bad crunching risk. Maybe double 5 or 4 has the same benefits without the higher downsides. If the big doubles are too strong overall it could be interesting to think about it in only contact positions, where racing numbers aren't quite as strong.

And what about the worst roll? 2-1 is a potential choice but even for opening rolls it's about in the middle, with 4-1 being the worst according to https://www.bkgm.com/openings/rollouts.html

Would be interesting to do an XG analysis of the best and worst rolls across thousands of board positions, overall and in non-racing positions.

Posted Feb 15, 2026, 10:57 PM UTC

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