Backgammon Rolls Back into Fashion

Backgammon was the game of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when the world was learning a new mean to be rich. From the Clermont Club to the Croisette in Cannes, from Palm Beach to Puerto Banus, their shouts of exasperation were heard. Backgammon seemed to suit the times - fast, and portable. Perhaps it was the gambling mania that had gripped high society in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s as fortunes carefully assembled during the 19th century by diligent Victorians were frittered away at illegal gambling parties and then at the tables of the newly legalised casinos. Whatever the reason, the 'cruellest game', as it was identified, was everywhere - especially on bookshelves.

Backgammon in Popular Culture 

There are many Books on backgammon from that period and the imagery aside - swollen period typefaces and photographs that belong on the cover of a Harold Robbins novel - they are intriguing to read as they provide insight they give into the times. For instance Backgammon the Cruelest [sic] Game, published in 1974, is larded with gnomic quotes from Clausewitz, my favourite of which is, 'Defence in itself is a negative exercise, since it focuses on resisting the intentions of the enemy rather than being occupied with our own.' The Clermont Book of Backgammon (1975), with a cover showing a large bow tie designed like a backgammon board, sees backgammon used as tool of geopolitical analysis; in it Archbishop Makarios is summed up as 'a really terrible backgammon player'. Enough said.

Backgammon has also made it into the movies, my favourite being in the opening sequence of a gloriously kitsch heist movie/jet-set gore-fest called Killer Fish starring Lee Majors, Margaux Hemingway and one of the Berensons.

Backgammon is Changing Online

I mention all this because the game has changed, like everything else, with the arrival of the internet. Although it is yet to reach the level of poker (nevertheless the 2005 backgammon championships in Monaco were filmed as a four-part television show), computer technology has changed the game in a radical way which caused a drastic rise in popularity.

Backgammon has always had somewhat nocturnal edge to it; apparently this is why so many of the top players are Scandinavian, as it can pass the long winter nights, and the world of the internet is perfect for the obsessive player who would be happy to reduce the human contact element to focus on the interplay of mathematics and chance.