Word: backgammoner
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Snob Appeal. It is not by accident that backgammon has been rediscovered. Ten years ago, Prince Alexis ("Obie") Obolensky, a member of the jet set and a shrewd entrepreneur, set out to make backgammon a popular game. Phase 1 of his elaborate strategy was to exploit backgammon's snob appeal. He haunted the posh watering places from Palm Beach to Gstaad, talking up the game. "I made people think they should be doing it, that only the best people were involved," he recalls. "We brought in snobbism. Only in America can that kind of thing be done...
Phase 3, which Obolensky is working on now, will bring backgammon to the masses. He is getting a hand from Playboy magazine, which this month is sending Bunnies to several veterans' hospitals to dispense game boards and instructions. He is also being helped by Seagram Distillers Co., which sponsors tournaments and pays him a consultant's fees...
...black the other. When a player has collected all of his counters on his "home" points, he can begin to "bear off" (remove his pieces); the first to remove all his pieces wins. He is awarded a single game, a double game ("gammon") or a triple game ("backgammon"), depending upon the position of his opponent's counters at the end of the game...
...there is also a provision that makes backgammon especially enticing to gamblers, so much so that playing without money takes the competitive edge off the game. At any stage, a player who feels he is likely to win can immediately double the stakes, leaving his opponent with two options: to concede immediately or to accept the double, and perhaps redouble later if his own position improves. Because there is no limit to the number of times the stakes can be doubled, losers of high $200-a-point games can sometimes drop $10,000 in an evening...
...past two years he has won over $40,000 in tournament prizes-and far more in private games. The intrusion of these professional players into what before Obolensky's promotion was strictly a genteel, upper-crust diversion has proven upsetting to some members of the old-school backgammon establishment. "Gammon is supposed to be fun," says Lewis Deyong, a London businessman who is one of the world's top-ranked players. "But with all these bridge types in the game it has become kind of a war of nerves." One common complaint is that the bridge players take...