We met by the sea, the dark-clad Norwegian champion and I. She had brought her professional backgammon board in a special bag made of thick black leather. The stage was set. The photographer was ready. Then we rolled the dice on who would start the game … Marianne Husum is the reigning Norwegian champion in speed backgammon, a championship where fast backgammon is played. Like a lightning jacket. Last year she won a silver medal in France. Husum is very good. I also play backgammon. I’m actually pretty good, I think. Also, I have a big mouth. Now I saw the chance to beat a Norwegian champion and challenged her to a duel. We agreed on a date. I had two weeks to sharpen the knives. *** There are around 140,000 board games in the world right now. I am writing right now because the number is increasing all the time. Common to most games is that they mix strategy and luck in varying amounts. The ladder game requires quite a bit of strategy and thinking, while the modern game Settlers of Catan requires more cleverness and playing skills. The ladder game is an ancient Indian game. The moral of the game is that there are ups and downs in life. Photo: The British Library Still, luck is a factor in most board games. You can be completely blown away by strategy, but win by luck and chance. If one is lucky with the dice. This is what I was hoping for in the duel against Husum. That the odds, i.e. the dice, would go my way. And I am far from the first to have thought exactly this. Once upon a time … Games came before language. That is not my claim, but the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s. He writes in the book “Homo Ludens” that games are the very starting point for human interaction. It is the start of everything. “The Royal Game of Ur” the world’s oldest game that we know. Swipe right and you’ll get the rules. Photo: The British Museum The rules for the Game of Ur were set in stone several thousand years ago. That way you avoid arguments at least. These are kept at the British Museum. Photo: The British Museum This is my interpretation of Huizinga’s text: A Stone Age man was bored one day and rummaged around among all the bones after the previous dinner. Then he found some small cubic bones. These originate from the ankles of the hind legs of animals they had eaten. This bone (talus) has four completely different sides. One side is flat and easy to get when you throw the bone on the ground. The opposite side, on the other hand, is difficult to obtain. The last two sides of the bone are halfway between difficult and easy. The cube was thus invented while washing the dishes after a good dinner. Ancient bone cubes have been found all over the globe. These specimens are kept in the British Museum Photo: THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM And whoever was lucky with the roll of the dice felt that EVERYTHING was on their side. As if the universe was playing along. Intoxicating. This is what we gamblers seek – the true happiness of a good roll of the dice. Not random? But in addition to the boundless joy of a good roll around the campfire, people began to think that the dice might be showing more than just themselves. That it was God who showed himself in the cast. What else would it be, like? In an unclear world, God’s finger can sound like a reasonable source of luck and bad luck. Even the Bible says so, in the proverb of Solomon. It says that even if people throw the dice, it is God who decides the outcome. With such a thought pattern, it was a short road to using dice for far more serious matters – who will receive the death penalty in a trial, for example. In 1774, the two small farmers Carl Hindrichsson Hjort and Erik Jakobsson killed a public servant in Selö in Sweden. On the morning of 21 November 1775, the two had to play dice in the courtroom. As there was only one victim in the case, but two perpetrators, it did not make sense to the court that both should receive the death penalty. Carl and Erik each got a wooden cup and two dice. In the first half both got 9. They hit again. Then Erik Jakobsson got 7 and Carl Hindrichson Hjort 10. God had spoken. Jakobsson received the death penalty … but only after they had cut off his right hand and broken all the legs in his body. Why? The last known court case in Sweden where dice determined sentencing was in 1806. Then a married couple had to throw dice at each other to decide which of them should receive the death penalty, after the two of them allegedly killed a vagrant. The man lost. In 1841, a law was passed against the use of dice rolls in court cases in Sweden. Then one had become completely sure that it is not God’s finger that controls the dice, even though the Bible says so. In other words, dice are random. Is it possible to gain control over coincidences? In order to win over the Norwegian champion in backgammon, I had to sort out any coincidences, if possible. So then I called Yngve Vogt. He knows a lot about this. – Stochastics is the exact science of chance. Yngve Vogt is the author of the book “Tilfeldig!” where he writes about everything from who wins the wine lottery at work, how the insurance industry works, or the dilemma of monetary policy – in short – how chance rules your life. (Now Yngve Vogt was not so lucky with the coincidences surrounding the launch of the book. It was launched on the same day that the country was closed due to corona, so the book drowned in the pandemic. You can safely say that the coincidences of the heart were not on the author’s side.) Vogt calculates coincidences and probabilities in mathematical formulas. He has done that since he was a child and fell in love with statistical yearbooks as a six-year-old. It became his favorite book and he got it from his parents for Christmas every year after that. I invited Yngve Vogt to a game of regular yatzy in the basement at Marienlyst. Vogt provided several huge sheets with calculations of probabilities for all number combinations in the game. I entered with my usual intense desire to win and steely faith in my own luck. It started well for Vogt and badly for me. In the second half I had to put four on twos. That was not good. Then he looked at me over his glasses and stuck his finger down on a calculation that was supposed to be proof of how unlikely it was that I would now win. It’s just about doing something enough times that Yngve Vogt’s glasses fogged up slightly. The flood of speech was overwhelming. With words and facts he showed me his random and probable calculations. According to Vogt, humanity can be divided into two groups: Those who believe and those who do not believe in coincidences. And – as he added – those who believe that there is something predestined about what happens, suffer from number block – they don’t like mathematics. Because, if you want to calculate exactly on coincidences, you have to come up with large amounts of numbers. – If you roll a dice once, the outcome may be random. But if you hit 1,000 times, you will get roughly the same number of all sides, said Vogt. So it’s just about trying enough. High enough numbers. Then all coincidences will even out in the end. It is at this point that a game challenges. It does not contain enough rolls for the numbers to even out. On the contrary, they can be profoundly unfair. Like for example when Yngve Vogt and I played yatzy in the basement of news. Despite countless probabilities and coincidences calculated in fractions by an educated man who loves statistics – I won. And I didn’t win without sound, no. I roared out and threw my arms in the air. That’s how it is for some of us players. We have to rub the victory into the loser regardless of whether Yngve Vogt was a nice guest who just wanted to help along the way. Games are the only area in life where it is permissible to be mean to others. You can force the opponent into prison, take away the pieces, the plots, the money or simply throw them out of the game. Because the die, the chance, is present, this is law. Because deep down we all know that luck or bad luck doesn’t say anything about you as a person. Therefore, you can live out your inner child in verbal noise. Everything is fine in games between friends. There is only one rule – you must not be a bad loser when the game is lost. The Duel The hour of reckoning had come. Now the duel was to take place – Norwegian champion Marianne Husum against a big-mouthed amateur. We met by the sea. Backgammon is one of the oldest games we still play. For a few thousand years, two competitors have moved their pieces throughout the game and out the other side. Two dice each. First person wins. It’s simple, but incredibly obsessive. The same thing with approx. 2,500 years in between Photo: XXX / Javier Auris, news Around the Mediterranean, older men often sit outdoors and slap the dice in their laps on wooden boards while shouting out in joy or irritation at the way the game is going. This is not how a Norwegian backgammon champion plays. On the contrary – Marianne Husum was calm and low-key. She talked about how she systematically records games on video and analyzes the moves from old games. Not even her game board made a sound. The underlay was made of felt and the shaking boxes lacked the well-known sound. It gave the game itself authority and seriousness. I got nervous. She won the first round easily, but game number two went my way. It was 1-1. Herrejemini I was so eager. I shook the dice like a maniac and threw so hard that they landed in the wrong place and I had to repeat the shot. Decent amateur, but I saw a chance to beat the Norwegian champion himself on her home court… In the third and last round I was humiliated – I was played gammon. It’s the second worst thing you can be. Unfortunately, I can’t blame my opponent’s luck. I don’t want to be a bad loser (even if she got double 6 several times that is 😊). Instead, I have to write about the embarrassing loss and show the whole world when I committed hubris: to challenge the Norwegian backgammon champion. It reminds me of something else I’ve read but apparently forgotten – don’t play cat and mouse if you’re a mouse. Musa’s advice if you absolutely want to win at games: Don’t play against cats (now I remember). Push down the number of rounds you will play, and trust your luck. If you win, do not agree to revenge. To parents: Play with your children. Either you win, or your genes win. Hi! Did you feel like sending me an email about the matter, or a suggestion for other things I should look into? Does. Please also read my story about tiled stoves.
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Can an amateur beat the Norwegian backgammon champion? – Culture
