Word: backgammoner
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...both sides of the continent critics and public now have a chance to judge the mature work of a painter who has become almost as essential to smart dinner table conversation as backgammon: Jose Clemente Orozco. Vibrant, intensely serious Artist Orozco is Mexican, of lineage from the 15th Century Conquistador es. One-armed, squarejawed, thickset, with glittering spectacles he looks not unlike an ecstatic bullfrog. In 1922, after a painful apprenticeship tinting postcards in California and drawing scathing cartoons in Mexico, he joined the famed Syndicate of Revolutionary Artists organized by Minister of Education Jose Vasconcelos.* Led by spectacular, pistol...
...authority on backgammon is Grosvenor Nicholas, Manhattan clubman, retired wine importer. Last week his book, issued in 1928 when nobody cared, enjoyed high sales. Backgammoner Nicholas himself, urbane, quiet-spoken, contradicted his own contention that there is no skill in the game by winning, in one afternoon, 35 games of backgammon in a club (New York Racquet & Tennis) where sometimes 1,000 games are played a day. Writes he: "It is unnecessary to preserve silence, always so depressing. The disturbing presence of the fair sex . . . is never unwelcome. Where there is no concentration, there can be no distraction...
After discussing the derivation of the game, telling how to play it, codifying its rules, Backgammoner Nicholas accounts for the present vogue. Backgammon has become popular, will become more so, he insists, because to the old deliberate dicing game of Egyptian kings and Roman politicians contemporary rules have added a new convention-doubling. After a game has started, any player may, at any time before he throws his dice, double the stake for which the game is being played. The opponent can either accept the double and go on with the game or refuse it, sacrifice his stake, start...
...some unaccountable reason," writes Backgammoner Nicholas, "opponents at backgammon indulge themselves in mental and emotional activities to an extraordinary degree and far beyond anything that the play of this simple game seems to require. . . . The extent of these manifestations seems to be peculiar to backgammon...
...Backgammon is played upon a board of checkerboard size, with 15 draughtsmen for each of the two players, and a pair of dice. The board is divided into four "tables," each being marked with six long triangular "points'' colored alternately in two colors. The object: to move your draughtsmen in accordance with the dice throws from your opponent's inner table to your own, and off, before he does...