677. Can Backgammon Save Us from Ourselves?

Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
Episode: 677 – Can Backgammon Save Us from Ourselves?
Host: Stephen J. Dubner
Date: June 12, 2026

In this episode, Stephen Dubner explores the age-old game of backgammon to uncover why the game endures, what it teaches us about life and decision-making, and what its current renaissance says about our culture’s desires for luck, risk, community, and meaning. Through interviews with top players, game theorists, club organizers, and entrepreneurs, the episode investigates whether backgammon—by blending probability, risk, psychology, and sociability—might just be the perfect game for our unpredictable lives.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Enduring Allure and Structure of Backgammon

• A Universal Game

  • Backgammon is described as easy to learn, but endlessly deep.
    • “There is an ancient board game that you can learn in 15 minutes and then think about for the rest of your life.” — Stephen Dubner (01:53)
  • It has had various global heydays, especially among gamblers, and is now experiencing a renaissance as a social, analog alternative to digital socialization and dating.

• Volatility and Life Lessons

  • The game incorporates both luck (rolling dice) and skill, making outcomes uncertain and mirroring life’s unpredictability.
    • “Now it's an even game… If you hit, I'm dead.” — Masayuki "Mochi" Mochizuki (05:40)
    • “It's all about probability... If you make a good choice, you have a better chance to get a better outcome... But you may lose because of the good choice. But you shouldn't regret that you made that choice because that then was a good choice.” — Mochi (07:08)

• The Doubling Cube's Strategic Depth

  • Backgammon’s distinctive “doubling cube” adds a layer of leverage, risk, and psychological tension, further separating it from games like chess.
    • “If you do not know how to handle the cube, you're never going to win a tournament.” — Mark Olson (13:20)
    • “The cube is not just a scorekeeping device, it's a weapon.” — Frank Frigo (11:49)

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2. Backgammon and Decision-Making: Economics, Life, and Learning

• Parallel to Economics

  • Each move involves trade-offs, calculated risks, sunk costs, and decision-making under uncertainty—economic concepts made tangible on the board.
    • “Backgammon is a multi dimensional game where all the variables, they are entangled. ... There's constantly trade offs to be made.” — Mark Olson (31:44)
  • Sunk cost fallacy and opportunity costs are ever-present, echoing investment and real-world thinking.

• Skill vs. Luck

  • Unlike poker, where sufficient skill can be overwhelmed by luck, in backgammon, a novice has almost no chance in a lengthy match against a top player.
    • “If you took somebody you just introduced to the game and they played a top level player... they would have almost a zero chance of beating that player.” — Frank Frigo (15:29)

• Developing Resilience and Focus

  • The psychological demands of backgammon—handling emotional swings and maintaining focus—are cited as key ingredients for success, both in backgammon and beyond.
    • “This ability to turn the page and look at a new circumstance, a new problem, and treat it independently... you just got to purge your brain of all that pollution and really focus in a disciplined way on what's in front of you.” — Frank Frigo (19:04)

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3. From Board to Algorithm: Backgammon’s Digital and Analytical Revolution

• The Neural Network Breakthrough

  • The arrival of neural-net-based software (like TD-Gammon in the 1990s, Extreme Gammon later) revolutionized both play and learning: positions could be solved and error rates computed, shattering illusions and raising the standard of tournament play.
    • “When the neural networks came along... it more or less killed the money action in backgammon, the worst players all of a sudden realized how bad they were.” — Bob Wachtel (43:27)
    • “The level at the top is so high nowadays that it's much more a game of not making mistakes.” — Mark Olson (45:47)

• Backgammon as Data Science

  • Techniques from backgammon analysis led to innovations in sports analytics, particularly for NFL decision-making.
    • “We built proprietary models... the idea was to take a game based approach to solving difficult problems.” — Frank Frigo (22:05)
    • “We licensed to about 12 NFL teams. Most famously, we worked with the Philadelphia Eagles during their Super Bowl run.” — Frank Frigo (25:07)

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4. The Social Side: Clubs, Community, and the Modern Renaissance

• In-person Revival

  • There’s a new wave of city clubs and social leagues, led by enthusiasts like Remy Davenport in New York. Attendance is booming, with the game offering an alternative to online existence and dating apps.
    • “People want in person experiences. They want to get off dating apps. They want to make new friends.” — Remy Davenport (02:27, 56:00)
    • “I left my job after a year of starting the club because I just felt like I could not be one foot in the door and one foot out the door of trying to grow backgammon.” — Remy Davenport (56:48)

• Women and Inclusion

  • New efforts like “Gals Who Gammon” are working to diversify participation.

• Tournament Play vs. Online

  • Transitioning from app-based play to live tournaments brings unique physical and psychological challenges—cold/hot rooms, social pressure, stamina.
    • “There's smelly people, there's like just so much crazy going on. And the stamina of just sitting there and focusing game after game.” — Remy Davenport (60:09)

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5. History, Glamour, and Hustle: From the Golden Era to Now

• 1970s “Golden Era”

  • Backgammon in the 1970s and 80s was glamorous, hedonistic, and a hotbed of colorful characters, hustlers, dealers, and sometimes outright cheaters—glamorous, but also rife with delusion and exploitation.
    • “Hugh Hefner... is responsible for backgammon becoming a fad in the 1970s because he proposed this kind of hedonistic, sophisticated, glamorous lifestyle.” — Bob Wachtel (36:04)
    • “There were snobs of different kinds and posers and drifters and people who were cheaters…” — Bob Wachtel (36:53)
    • “I once played this coke dealer... she paid me in drugs and a Gucci sweater…” — Bob Wachtel (41:26)

• AI Levels the Field

  • Neural nets deflated the mystique, made the game fairer but reduced the easy money for hustlers, and raised the quality of play.
  • The social scene is now “more normalized,” less wild, but growing thanks to organizers.

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6. Memorable Quotes and Moments

• Backgammon as Mindfulness
  • “I think of backgammon as a masochistic mindfulness. When I'm playing, I'm not thinking about anything else. ... You feel alive. I'm actually experiencing something.” — Frank Frigo (62:38)
• Beauty and Style
  • "I hate making ugly moves." — Mark Olson (65:21)
• On the Joy of Unpredictability
  • “It's very entertaining because the things you imagine are impossible happen, and things that you would swear are unlikely can happen just as often as that.” — Bob Wachtel (62:20)
• Social Essence
  • "Backgammon's just a way more social game. You play with one hand and there's a drink in your other hand, like, that's the game." — Remy Davenport (61:36)

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Significant Timestamps

• 01:53: Introduction to backgammon’s deep appeal — Dubner and Frank Frigo
• 07:08: Life lessons from backgammon and the role of probability — Mochi
• 11:49–13:44: The doubling cube and its transformative role in risk and excitement — Frank Frigo & Mark Olson
• 15:29–16:45: Luck versus skill in backgammon vs. poker — Frank Frigo
• 19:04–20:33: Psychological traits for success and the importance of composure and focus — Frank Frigo
• 22:05–25:40: Application of backgammon analysis to NFL team analytics — Frank Frigo
• 31:44–33:45: Game theory, economics, and teaching through backgammon — Mark Olson
• 36:04–41:26: Stories from the wild 1970s/80s heyday — Bob Wachtel
• 43:27–45:47: Impact of neural networks on the game’s evolution and participatory realities — Bob Wachtel & Mark Olson
• 52:13–56:00: The current social club boom and motivations for today’s players — Mark Olson & Remy Davenport
• 58:03: Organizing large-scale social backgammon leagues — Remy Davenport
• 60:09: The unique challenges of tournament play — Remy Davenport
• 61:36: Backgammon’s distinct social nature — Remy Davenport
• 62:20, 62:38: On unpredictability and the feeling of being fully alive during play — Bob Wachtel & Frank Frigo

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Conclusion

The episode closes with Dubner reflecting on the broad, interconnected lessons of backgammon: as a skill-based, luck-infused test of nerves and intellect; as a microcosm of economic and psychological realities; and as a newly thriving social phenomenon. Players and organizers alike see the game as a means of robust living, mindful focus, and authentic connection—a pastime uniquely well-suited to the joys and uncertainties of life.

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For further reference:

• Interviews: Masayuki “Mochi” Mochizuki, Frank Frigo, Mark Olson, Bob Wachtel, Remy Davenport, Melissa Shin
• Notable moments with timestamps (above)
• Main themes: probability, risk, education, psychology, sociability, the impact of technology, and the enduring magic of games.

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Notable Quote (Frank Frigo, 62:38):
"I think of backgammon as a masochistic mindfulness. When I'm playing, I'm not thinking about anything else. Hours could go by, I forget to eat. I forget every other thing going on in my life. I'm going through all of these...ups and downs and twists and turns...you feel alive."

Transcript

[Stephen Dubner]

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[Frank Frigo]

I haven't met a human being yet that plays back him and that the game doesn't get under their skin. That game will get to you.

[Stephen Dubner]

Backgammon has had a few heydays in modern history, especially among gamblers.

[Bob Wachtell]

She paid me in drugs and a Gucci sweater that her friends had boosted from Rodera Drive.

[Stephen Dubner]

NFL teams have used backgammon theory to win the Super Bowl.

[Frank Frigo]

They're risk averse, at least they used to be before we came onto the scene.

[Stephen Dubner]

And now backgammon is having a whole new renaissance.

[Remy Davenport]

People want in person experiences. They want to get off dating apps. They want to make new friends.

[Stephen Dubner]

Today on Freakonomics Radio we continue our occasional series on games with a simple question. Can backgammon save us from ourselves? Okay, the dice are yours.

[Remy Davenport]

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host Stephen Dubner.

[Stephen Dubner]

This past January, the U.S. backgammon Federation held a big tournament, the New York Metropolitan Backgammon Open. And at a hotel in Jersey City, it drew more than 400 players in a variety of brackets, from beginner to grandmaster. They came from all over the US as well as Germany, South Africa, Greece, Peru. The field included many of the world's top ranked players, like this one.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

My name is Masayuki Mochizuki. People call me Mochi. I am a professional backend player.

[Stephen Dubner]

Mochi is arguably the best backgammon player alive. He has turned the game into a career.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

Play tournaments everywhere in the world. Teaching, writing a book, playing a private game, and everything about backgammon. That's me.

[Stephen Dubner]

Mochi had flown in from Japan for the Jersey City tournament, but he busted out in the first round. That's the thing about backgammon. It is a dice game, which means it can be volatile, and the better player does not always win. I found Mochi in a side room off the tournament area. He was playing a money game with some of the others who had already busted out of the tournament. He told me he was staying on in New York City for a few days, so I invited him to come play backgammon at my apartment. If you want to just play, great. If you want to teach and talk while we play, I'm happy to play for money. I don't expect you to play for free.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

No, no, it's. It's fine. We can play for free.

[Stephen Dubner]

But, I mean, I know that's how you make your living, so I don't want to ask you to work for. I have $500 in my pocket. Okay. I'm not planning to leave with it.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

500 lasts, like three minutes, but that's okay. I'm joking.

[Stephen Dubner]

Testing.

[Mark Olson]

Wrong one.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

Four.

[Stephen Dubner]

Oh, thank you. Nice roll. Come on. Things changed very fast there.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

Now it's an even game.

[Stephen Dubner]

Yeah.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

Yeah. If you hit, I'm dead.

[Stephen Dubner]

Yeah.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

52. This is very scary.

[Stephen Dubner]

Yeah. Don't be scared.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

No, I am scared.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

This gonna be a shot anyway, so

[Stephen Dubner]

I gotta hit Deuce. So this is the roll. If I roll a four, I'm going to win. If I don't roll a four, I'm probably going to lose.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

They roll in the middle.

[Stephen Dubner]

Purgatory. That's okay.

[Mark Olson]

All right.

[Stephen Dubner]

All right.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

Batman is not the game that you decide the strategy. All you can do is you follow the dice's advice. You know, you' to against the dice. The game plan that you had in your mind that you want to kill that's long gone.

[Stephen Dubner]

Got it, got it, got it.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

That being said, maybe I hit you. Actually,

[Stephen Dubner]

I was thinking about doing this. That would have been terrible because if

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

you waited longer, then I have more ammunition to come in and it will be more dangerous. So it's actually all about timing.

[Mark Olson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

This game actually has a lot of similarity in the life to life life. You don't know what's going to happen. It's all about probability. If you make a good choice, you have a better chance to get a better outcome. Right. But it's just a chance. So you may lose because of the good choice. Right. But you shouldn't regret that you made that choice because that then was a good choice. So you have to be confident.

[Mark Olson]

1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 1.

[Stephen Dubner]

Brilliant.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

It's a good game.

[Stephen Dubner]

It was really good.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

Yeah. I thought, you're gonna win this one.

[Stephen Dubner]

Well, my $500 did last more than three minutes, maybe an hour. We played three short matches and Mochi won all of them. But I held my own against a world champion. And I certainly couldn't do that on the basketball court or a football field. That is just one of the many interesting things about this game. Another is what Mochi said about how backgammon is a lot like life itself. And I would hear some version of that from just about everyone I spoke with. As we were making this episode at the Jersey City tournament, I had met a very good player named Melissa Shinn who works as an architect in Los Angeles. And she told me to get in touch with her next time I was in town. And she would put together an event with her backgammon club. Yes, there are backgammon clubs more and more all the time. And I happened to be in LA soon after. So we met up at a beer garden in Venice Beach. Melissa had set up a game for me.

[Remy Davenport]

We're gonna do doubles.

[Stephen Dubner]

Think me and Frank against you guys. Oh, it's me and Bob against you and Frank.

[Remy Davenport]

Yeah.

[Bob Wachtell]

All right, here it is. Make it fun. This could be fun.

[Stephen Dubner]

My partner is Bob Wachtell, a ranked Grandmaster. A couple years ago, I had taken a few lessons from him. Melissa's partner, Frank Frigo is another world class player, a two time world champion. I'm not going to make you listen to another match, but I will say this. Bob and I won. Take that, Mochi. Later on, I sat down with Frank Frigo, asked him to introduce himself.

[Frank Frigo]

My name is Frank Frigo and I am somewhat semi retired. I'm playing a lot of professional backgammon these days. I Travel to tournaments, I teach, I lecture. I did have an analytics company for about 13 years, and I still do some consulting in sports betting and sports analytics.

[Stephen Dubner]

Of all the games ever invented and ever played, is backgammon your favorite game?

[Frank Frigo]

I haven't played all of them for sure, but I would argue it's the greatest game. It has all the elements of complexity. The pace is wonderful. It's designed as a gambling game. It's a fantastic mind sport. The game is played at amazing locations around the world. It's got a beautiful aesthetic. If you come to one of our tournaments, you will see the most beautiful custom made backgammon boards. And there's something about the sound, the touch, the feeling that adds to the whole experience. I think it's. Yeah, I think it's the greatest game out there.

[Stephen Dubner]

If you were to call backgammon an industry, I'm not sure whether you would use that word or a sector. How do you think about the size of it?

[Frank Frigo]

I've heard something like 300 million people play globally. In some countries where it has a long, deep history, you see backgammon or Tavla or Sheshbesh, however they want to call it in particular, culture is played everywhere. So what I see, even in the United States, is that there's multiple tiers. There's this social component of it. Then there's the casual tournament player. Then you have the more serious tournament player. There's a big spectrum.

[Stephen Dubner]

For someone who doesn't know the game, just explain it as briefly as you can. The basic setup and goal.

[Frank Frigo]

Okay, so each side has 15 checkers in a particular starting arrangement. And the game is essentially a race. Your pieces or your stones, as they would have called it way back in the day. You're trying to get them around the board and into your home board. There's four quadrants. You try to get those checkers into your home board and bear them off as quickly as possible. But along the way, there's a lot of contact and those checkers interact. If you land on a spot where your opponent only has a single checker, we call that a blot. That blot has to go back to the beginning. So while it's a race, it's not that simple. Sometimes you're trying to slow yourself down, sometimes you're trying to speed yourself up.

[Stephen Dubner]

Then talk about the leverage and the excitement and volatility that is introduced by using the doubling cube.

[Frank Frigo]

The idea behind the doubling cube is that you're playing a game for a stake of a single point. If you win the game, you get a point. If you bear off all your checkers before your opponent's born off any, you win a gammon. That's a double game, but it's double whatever the current value of the cube is. The cube starts out at a value of one. When it's your turn before you roll, you have the option, if the cube is in the middle, to tell your opponent, I want to double the stakes of the game. So the opponent has to then make a decision. Do I want to play this game for double the stakes or do I want to turn down the cube and the game ends immediately and they give up the point? The decision is, I can give up one point with certainty and start a brand new game, or I can accept the cube and now play this game for double the stakes, but I'm accepting the risk that I could lose two points, I could lose four points, and I have to compare that distribution of potential outcomes versus the guaranteed one point that I would relinquish. The other layer on top of that is that the cube is not just a scorekeeping device, it's a weapon. When you own the cube, you have bought the rights to it, which gives you the rights to play the game to the end. It also gives you the rights to redouble the stake back to four, which puts pressure on your opponent.

[Mark Olson]

If you do not know how to handle the cube, you're never going to win a tournament.

[Stephen Dubner]

That is Mark Olsen, another of the world's top ranked players. He's Danish and used to play professional soccer. So yes, he's pretty competitive.

[Mark Olson]

The Doppelgan cube is a fantastic device that was invented in the 1920s. Backgammon has existed for thousands of years, but the Dublin cube has only been around for around 100 years.

[Stephen Dubner]

It must have been so boring before then.

[Mark Olson]

Well, they still played backgammon without the cube in many parts of the world. But I agree, the Dublin cube is the most fun part about backgammon. With check or play moves, you can compare your move to other moves, which inherently make it easier because you've got something to compare it to. Whereas with a doubling cube, you've got nothing to compare it to.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's the thing about the doubling cube. It occupies its own special dimension in the game. The two dice that you roll on every turn that dictate where you can move your checkers, they are inherently random, so you have to plan for and adapt to that randomness. The doubling cube is the only part of the game that can be unilaterally controlled. And who Invented the cube. As Frank Frigo told us, that fact is still in dispute within the backgammon community. He mentioned a 1930 New Yorker article that identified one possible inventor.

[Remy Davenport]

We have heard much debate on whether

[Stephen Dubner]

backgammon is basically a game of skill.

[Remy Davenport]

They say the innovation of doubling was important. This, according to one story, was thought

[Stephen Dubner]

of by the Grand Duke Dimitri, who

[Remy Davenport]

lives in Paris, where backgammon is called Trikatrak and who has been playing it for years.

[Stephen Dubner]

Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov was a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II and one of the few Romanov dukes to survive the Russian Revolution. He is thought to have been involved in the plot to murder Grigory Rasputin. So, yes, the history of backgammon is littered with interesting characters. As for the question of luck versus skill, here's Frank Frigo.

[Frank Frigo]

It's a really difficult question because you've got to put some real context around it. Every decision, with the exception of forced moves in backgammon is a skillful decision. The issue is how much it actually affects the outcome. You're going to get randomness thrown into the equation, which is what makes the game great. I'm going to oversimplify poker for a second, but imagine you're at the World Series main event and take whoever you think is the most skillful poker player on the planet. Let's just say it's Phil Ivey at the World Series main event, in a showdown, I could take someone, a five year old kid, that has never played poker in their life and I could give them a very simple set of rules where I could guarantee they could take down the top player probably a third of the time. I could prove that mathematically. I could just get them to push the whole time and eventually the opponent will have to call. And in backgammon, if you took somebody you just introduced to the game and they played a top level player at a major tournament length match, say 19 to 25 points, they would have almost a zero chance of beating that player. Because you have so many active decisions, you can't simplify the game down to that level. This is going to make poker players cringe because I'm oversimplifying poker, but it's a fact.

[Stephen Dubner]

Frank, you are a two time world backgammon champion, correct?

[Frank Frigo]

Yes.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'd love you to walk me through both your wins. First, 1994, give me the who, what, when, where, why of that tournament win.

[Frank Frigo]

That was a very memorable experience. The World Championship has been played in Monte Carlo since the 1970s. It's been at the Same location, the Fairmont Hotel, this iconic hotel. I was with my wife and we decided to go to Europe for an extended road trip to Monte Carlo. I was a fairly accomplished player back then. I played a decent amount. I didn't have kids yet or anything. I got on a roll, and it was like a magic carpet ride for me because I didn't really have a close match. The quality of play back then wasn't as good as it is today, but I just got on a very good role. I won the main event eight matches, undefeated. I entered the Super Jackpot, which is the big separate event, and I went undefeated in that as well. That was 1994.

[Stephen Dubner]

Your second one was in 2023. That's an amazingly long stretch to be at the peak of your game. What was the difference between Frank Frigo in 1994 and Frank Frigo in 2023?

[Frank Frigo]

In 1994, I had more physical stamina, but I don't think I was as seasoned as a player to handle the emotional swings of the game, which are a big component of it. In 94, I was fortunate that I won a lot of matches by very clean scores, so I didn't have a lot of those more difficult emotional tests. In 2023, I had a lot of close matches. I had some crazy turnarounds and some late swings, but I was much better conditioned as a player to weather that, to be able to sort of turn the page and not let it get under my skin and say, what do I do now? New circumstance, new set of conditions. Regardless of what transpired last game, I've got to focus on what's going on in front of me and give myself the best chance. In 94, it was a blur. In 23, I really embraced it and enjoyed every step of the way and got to celebrate it with a lot of friends, which was really fun, too.

[Stephen Dubner]

What would you say are the characteristics of a good backgammon player, including perhaps some characteristics that might surprise people?

[Frank Frigo]

A lot of people think you've got to be like a mathematician. You really don't. There are very analytical aspects of the game where you're grinding numbers, like what we call match equities, where you've got to weigh a bunch of information and come up with the highest probability outcome. I feel like I'm pretty good at that. But there's also a big pattern recognition component, because once you're a few moves into the game, maybe you've got some reference positions in your mind that you've seen before, but it's just a Combinatorial explosion. When you get a few moves into a game and you haven't seen it before. And something that I think a lot of players underestimate is the execution part. It's one thing to sit in front of your computer and look at problems as quiz problems and say, what would I do? But it's an entirely different thing to do it over the board. Facing an opponent, traveling to a tournament. I will tell you I haven't met a human being yet that plays back him and that the game doesn't get under their skin. That game will get to you because you just feel like your best laid plans get thrown aside. This ability to turn the page and look at a new circumstance, a new problem, and treat it independently and not to think superstitiously. You just got to purge your brain of all that pollution and really focus in a disciplined way on what's in front of you. How do I frame my decision? How do I focus solely on only what I can control?

[Stephen Dubner]

Have you seen examples where someone just kind of becomes a more rounded person, a rounded thinker, by playing games? Whether it's backgammon or something else? Maybe that person was you.

[Frank Frigo]

It's definitely me. I've taken things from my life and put them into the game, but I think the game has given me much more in that direction. I co direct the San Diego Club, which is one of the biggest, fastest growing clubs in the country. And we have a number of people that play with us for different reasons. Some of them just love the competition. They love it as a mind sport, the intellectual stimulation, the social aspect. But another thing you hear, particularly from some of the older population, is they like to play because they feel like it keeps their mind sharp. Everybody's paranoid these days about dementia, and they want to keep their minds stimulated. Backgammon just does such a good job of that. You've got a lot of active decisions. You have to think probabilistically. I would say that the uncertainty component is more realistic of what people encounter in the business world and in social decisions. Chess is a great game, but chess, if you make the best move, it's the difference often between 100% winning path and 100% losing path. Whereas in backgammon, it's more probabilistic. And I think that is more like the decisions we encounter in real life.

[Stephen Dubner]

I had been told that Frank Frigo had put his backgammon obsession to good use in the analytics firm he founded and ran.

[Frank Frigo]

We built proprietary models for a variety of applications in sports, in commodity trading, in healthcare, in education, the idea was to take a game based approach to solving difficult problems. There's a lot of data out there, but there's not a lot of good ways to take that data and steer it towards a particular objective. So in commodity trading, it might be roi. In education, it might be how to reduce freshman attrition rates. In healthcare, it was how to reduce hospital readmissions for cardiac patients. And then of course, in sports, one of the big, big breakthroughs that we applied was we took a lot of ideas from the modeling of games and applied it to professional football.

[Stephen Dubner]

When you say you applied it to football, what kinds of scenarios or with what kind of goals in mind?

[Frank Frigo]

Originally, when I was just watching the game as a fan and I was a pretty seasoned backgammon player, I would look at what appeared to be the inherent risk aversion bias of head football coaches. They would get to fourth down decisions and they would sort of pucker up and relinquish possession.

[Stephen Dubner]

You're saying they're very risk averse.

[Frank Frigo]

At least they used to be. Before we came onto the scene, it struck me that those kinds of decisions are very, very similar to backgammon decisions and decisions that were modeled. One of the great breakthroughs in the modeling of games and backgammon in particular, was that when you focus on the proper objective, which in backgammon is giving yourself the highest probability of winning the match. And in football, if you apply the same metric, which is, how do I make a decision that gives me the highest expected outcome of a win? Not maximizing yardage, not assuring I get some amount of points on a particular drive. When you shift that objective in that metric, it really opens things up and you start to see that these risk averse decisions are actually quite wrong. We set out to build a model that could actually measure it. We did this by building a fully customizable simulation model that was built on a lot of NFL empirical data. My partner, Chuck Bauer, who is also an experimental physicist who did a lot of research at Indiana University and worked for NASA, he and I put our heads together to build a model that could simulate NFL games from start to finish, running clock penalties, the whole thing. We had a hypothesis that coaches were giving up quite a bit. It turned out after we started studying it more deeply, that they were worse at it than we even thought they were. They were giving up even more. Then we got excited. We were like, it's time to start knocking on some doors.

[Stephen Dubner]

And so how much is your model or versions of your model used in The NFL today, I would say it

[Frank Frigo]

influenced probably just about every team, some more directly, some indirectly. We licensed to about 12 NFL teams. Most famously, we worked with the Philadelphia Eagles during their super bowl run. They used it religiously. We had buy in from top to bottom, from Jeff Lurie, the owner, to Howie Roseman, the gm, to Doug Peterson and also with the Kansas City Chiefs. When you see Andy Reid on the headset during a game, he's speaking to Mike Frazier up in the booth. And Mike Frazier was consulting our models.

[Stephen Dubner]

Let me back up and make sure I understand. For Philadelphia Eagles fan, let's say, or a Kansas City Chiefs fan, their super bowl victories over the past several years, you're saying, are derived in some part from the application of backgammon theory?

[Frank Frigo]

Yes, absolutely. When the Eagles adopted it, we worked very closely with their analytics staff. They had some of their own internal models, but they were basically calibrating everything off of ours because it was a lot more sophisticated. The real similarity of football to backgammon is that you score in these unusual increments where in games like baseball, you're basically trying to produce runs and trying to keep your opponent from producing runs. And that correlates very, very well with win probability. Football's very different because you have a decaying clock and you score in different increments. So the utility of points changes dramatically based on the state of the game. And that's something that has been very, very well modeled in backgammon.

[Stephen Dubner]

Coming up after the break, how did that modeling happen? And just how wild was the backgammon scene in the 1970s and 80s? I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We will be right. Foreignomics Radio is sponsored by Pacific Life Insurance. Everyone knows promises have power. From pinky swears to cross my heart to I do. We make them throughout our entire lives. Anyone can make promises. What matters is keeping them. For nearly 160 years, the people at Pacific Life have been helping you keep yours. Whether it's protecting your today or planning your tomorrow, they are with you every step of the way. Pacific Life the Power of a promise. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you create a more confident financial future. Pacific Life Insurance Co. Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. Southern Company's commitment to meeting this demand stays the same. That's because Southern Company believes energy is more than a utility. It's what powers possibilities. So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Building the future of Energy. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Hotels.com Some names really do say it all. Hotels.com is one of them. When travelers book a hotel, they want savings that work for them, and hotels.com makes it simple. With Save your way members choose how to save save. Take an instant discount now or bank as rewards to use on later stays. No tricks or pressure, just flexibility and real value. For straightforward savings on your next stay, trust the hotel experts. Visit hotels.com it's all in the name.

[Mark Olson]

Backgammon is the best one of all the games. You could also say it's a game of economics, but then economics is also kind of life.

[Stephen Dubner]

That again, is Mark Olson. In addition to being a top ranked player, he co founded and runs Backgammon Galaxy, an online platform for playing and studying the game.

[Mark Olson]

Backgammon Galaxy was an idea that came up between me, Sandra Liloff and Mochi back in 2018. Mochi and Sandra are basically the two biggest backgammon legends in the world. The idea was simply just to have a unified grand backgammon site. Because it was kind of lacking, we just set out to do it. A bit of naivety there. Me and Sander came from the world of sports betting. Basically I was a quant in sports betting for the last 10 years. Prior to that, in 2019 or so, I went full time on by Gamma Galaxy trying to get this project up and running. We thought that we were going to be a money gaming site because that was kind of like the world we came from. But it wasn't really a good business plan. It's a very regulated market. We had trouble really getting off the ground. In the meantime we had a YouTube channel. It became the biggest backgammon YouTube channel quite fast. We realized that the opportunities in mobile gaming and social gaming were actually gigantic. The market is really, really big. So we pivoted and we started creating a product and we raised some money and we had the first real version, I would say, of Backgammon Galaxy, launched in 2022.

[Stephen Dubner]

How many players are on the site and how do you make money?

[Mark Olson]

We have about 220,000 users. We have a subscription and then we have some social coins. You can't withdraw them or anything for real value. It's just purely in the game. But you have users purchasing these coins

[Stephen Dubner]

as well, how much money do you actually make? If you can tell me?

[Mark Olson]

I don't think I'm in a position to reveal that. We are still in a competitive space,

[Stephen Dubner]

but it's a business that is at least aimed toward profitability or no.

[Mark Olson]

Yes it is. I mean, we've raised money a couple of times and we keep expanding. Our team is now 25 people. Half of them are so our developers and the rest are dealing with customer support. YouTube, social media, all kinds of stuff. Live tournaments. We own the World championship. So once a year in Monte Carlo, we host the world Championship.

[Stephen Dubner]

Let's spend a couple minutes talking about this nice point that you raise about backgammon as an illustration of economic thinking. In what ways do you see those parallels?

[Mark Olson]

Let's talk about trade offs that you face in every decision. Because backgammon is a multi dimensional game where all the variables, they are entangled. You can't just say all else being equal, it doesn't exist because every time you change one variable, all the other variables change. There's constantly trade offs to be made. Sometimes they are macro. I have a decision here between a priming game plan or a blitz attack. Sometimes it's micro. Do I promote that back checker one pip over there which slightly improves my racing chances or do I want to split it with the front?

[Stephen Dubner]

What about ideas like opportunity cost and sunk cost and decision making under uncertainty? Do you actively factor in those ideas as you're playing or is it more like they're just humming beneath the surface?

[Mark Olson]

Sunk cost. I think any professional investor or games player at a high level knows you should not dwell too much on sunk cost. It's in the past. Focus on making the best play. Opportunity cost comes in a lot in backgammon as well, especially when you're choosing between game plans. If you pursue this one game plan, there's an opportunity cost. It affects the optionality of going to another game plan later. Decision making under uncertainty, that's literally what you do on every single move. In backgammon, there's actually several levels to it. We do have complete information of the game. We can see all the pieces. Nothing is hidden. But we don't know the upcoming dice rolls. The future is uncertain. Just like the universe, Life is uncertain. The world is uncertain. Even at a quantum level. In backgammon we learn to deal with it. There's a psychological aspect to it, playing games. It trains you for being a more robust person. It rewards hard work and especially backgammon. If you're lazy and think you can win, you're going to lose. If you are reckless with your decision making and you're taking degenerate risk, you're going to be punished immediately. So even for kids, you know, I want to teach my son to play backgammon for that reason.

[Stephen Dubner]

I've heard you say that you want to teach your son to play backgammon not only for the sake of the game, but because gambling itself is a really good way to learn about the world and yourself. Can you just talk about that? I've heard you say that most people look at gambling as pure vice. And you have a different view.

[Mark Olson]

Exactly. So let's start by making a distinction. My distinction is that if you're betting on something like a roulette table, then you have no control of the outcome. It's purely gambling. I don't see any good in that. But if you're talking about backgammon or to some extent also poker, or to some extent also sports betting, where you can get an informational advantage, you can analyze the game in a way that is better than the market, or even when you see the rise now of the prediction market sites. So I do see that as a virtue more than a vice, that again, hard work is rewarded. There's instant negative feedback on your bad decisions. You harden your personality and your mental abilities to deal with stress and misfortune. We've played backgammon or a similar variant, basically as long as we've had dice. It has that advantage over other games that it simply evolved into this perfect equilibrium style of game where it's not too long, it's not too short, it has the right amount of luck to skill ratio. It's just a very balanced and perfect game.

[Stephen Dubner]

Backgammon is indeed one of the oldest games in the world in various forms. It has been played continuously in the Middle east since 3000 BCE. During the Crusades, it became a popular gambling game in Europe. Richard the Lionheart of England and Philip II of France issued a joint order banning the game for low ranking soldiers. Dan rather, in a 1978 piece for 60 Minutes, rattled off the these and many other backgammon facts as he discussed the rising popularity of the game in the United States.

[Mark Olson]

It is played everywhere, in the CBS cafeteria, for example, in modest rooms like the Bar Point Club on New York's 14th street, where the winner of the weekly tournament can win a few dollars. And it is played in elegant private clubs where the rich and famous gather to dance and drink and play.

[Bob Wachtell]

It was basically Hugh Hefner, who is responsible for backgammon becoming a Fad in the 1970s because he proposed this kind of hedonistic, sophisticated, glamorous lifestyle that involved lots of consumption of alcohol, some drugs, lots of sex, and anything that looked privileged and sophisticated.

[Stephen Dubner]

That is Bob Wachtel, my partner at the Los Angeles meetup. Wachtel got a PhD in philosophy, but as a profession he chose gambling. He was a world class backgammon player and a backgammon writer, chronicling the scene. And it was quite a scene to chronicle.

[Bob Wachtell]

I first learned to play in Toronto in 1977. I went to discos and there were backgammon sets in discos, backgammon tables. I played a guy there and the guy wrote me a check on a napkin. I said, what's this? He said, don't you know anything? He said, a check is just a piece of paper that the bank issues, but I'm writing my account number right on this napkin. So this is just as good as a check. If you went to tournaments, you'd find the most zany collection of characters. There were lots of people who pretended to be royalty. There were snobs of different kinds and posers and drifters and people who were cheaters. And lots of people were phonies. But none of them were very good at backgammon. And most of them believed that they were much, much better than they were, so they'd be willing to play anyone. In the early 70s, backgammon was a place of magical thinking. And people believed that it was a game of luck. They didn't do any work, most of them, but there was some work you could do and there was some calculation. There were ways of learning the game, which most of the populace didn't participate in at all.

[Stephen Dubner]

Did you do a lot of that kind of work yourself?

[Bob Wachtell]

I didn't do as much as some other people. If you really cared to learn specific elements of the game, you would set up a position and play it many times. People weren't shy about expressing their opinions in those days. You would make a move and one of your compatriots would say, that's ridiculous. How could anybody do that? And immediately you could challenge them to propositions. And those were situations you'd set up where each person would get their turn to make their move and the game would be played out to the end. And then you'd turn the board around and allow the other person to make their move. And the game would be played out till the end. You'd log a whole bunch of data. Not all of it was that valuable, because if you didn't play these games well. In subsequent moves, it didn't prove very much. But there were some very simple situations. Especially in bear offs at the last couple of moves of the game. Where the game could be played out in 10 seconds. And you could log hundreds of games. And sometimes, if you had an advantage, you could log hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

[Stephen Dubner]

And some people, we should say, Wrote not one, but two books Just about the bear off situation. Yes. That would be you.

[Bob Wachtell]

Yes, but only a tiny segment of the baroff. The first volume. I decided to name it in the game until the end. Because back in the day at the Mayfair Club in New York. The marks or pigeons, when they got in these positions, Would say, at least I'm in the game until the end. There was a lot of mockery of the pigeons. I always liken it to the vista that the pioneers in America encountered. When the bison covered the plains of the whole country. And you could shoot them at will. They were always there for the taking. That was what it was like in the early 70s.

[Stephen Dubner]

And the pigeons or marks or suckers or whales or whatever you want to call them. Were they the same cast of characters, or did you have to refresh the pigeons?

[Bob Wachtell]

There was an inflow of new pigeons. But the hustlers of the day Would husband them themselves into their little flocks. There were some hustlers at that club who really weren't good players at all. But they had flocks of even worse players, Much worse players. Who they'd shelter from people like me.

[Stephen Dubner]

You're supporting yourself. This is your profession.

[Bob Wachtell]

Yeah.

[Stephen Dubner]

Can you give some insight into your earnings? I'm guessing you don't have a nice, statistically sound career earnings calculation.

[Bob Wachtell]

No, I never kept records. But there were lots of times when I was not paid, when I was cheated. There was lots of stuff along the way that happened at that time. I once played this coke dealer, A woman coke dealer. And she paid me in drugs.

[Stephen Dubner]

I bet she did, yeah.

[Bob Wachtell]

A little bit of money and a Gucci sweater. That her friends had boosted from a shop in Rodeo Drive.

[Stephen Dubner]

And was that a kind of typical scene for a guy like you? Would we call you a hustler, or is that.

[Bob Wachtell]

I wouldn't call myself a hustler, no. Because to me, a hustler is someone who feigns incapacity.

[Stephen Dubner]

You didn't hide your ability.

[Bob Wachtell]

No, not at all. Not at all.

[Stephen Dubner]

How did you develop and keep your opponents playing you for money. When you were plainly better?

[Bob Wachtell]

There was this great club, the Cavendish Club in Los Angeles. I Could go there every night and have a game.

[Stephen Dubner]

What were the stakes?

[Bob Wachtell]

They used to play $10 or $20 a point, which would be like 75 or 100 today, something like that.

[Stephen Dubner]

So you could come out of there with several hundred dollars a night, easily. Maybe a couple thousand, right?

[Bob Wachtell]

Sure, sure.

[Stephen Dubner]

And overall, just to give a sense of the luck versus the skill overall, in a given year, do you think you were ever down for a given year?

[Bob Wachtell]

Oh, no, no, no, no.

[Stephen Dubner]

Oh, no. He says confidently. So, Mark, who would be the ideal Mark? Like, would I be really good because I'm, like, decent, but maybe good enough to think that I'm better than I am, and I'll just keep coming back and giving you my money like an atm?

[Bob Wachtell]

The ideal customer is someone who's very wealthy and enjoys locking horns with someone who's also good enough to give them the great challenge.

[Stephen Dubner]

So how good were you at the time?

[Bob Wachtell]

By today's standards, I was terrible. But I was one of the better players around. Things got much more difficult. The neural networks had a great effect on backgammon society.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's an interesting conundrum. I'd love you to explain. When the neural networks came along and you could actually identify what were good moves and what were bad moves, and you could acquire what's called an error rate or performance rating, what was that like for you?

[Bob Wachtell]

For me personally, it was a joy because I had a stack of note cards a foot high of positions I'd never been able to figure out. Even rolling out. I tried and tried and tried, and all of a sudden I could get the answers. It was bliss, but it was very annoying in the sense that the bad players could see how bad they were, and it more or less killed the money. Action in backgammon, the worst players all of a sudden realized how bad they were. There was a lawyer I played who lived in Marin county, had plenty of money. I played him for five years or so. I must have won almost every time we played. And at the end of those five years, and this is before the neural networks came along, he explained to me, he said, look, Bob, you have a slight edge on me, but we're basically at the same level. People could just live in that kind of delusion for years and years. But when the neural networks came along, not only did the worst players realize they were bad, but if they weren't willing to work and learn themselves, they'd fade away.

[Mark Olson]

Before the neural nets, nobody really knew what the best plays were.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's Mark Olson again. Backgammon Galaxy is Built atop a neural network that plays the game at a superhuman level. I asked him how this technology came about.

[Mark Olson]

In the 90s, AI algorithms with reinforcement learning was invented. A guy called Gerald Cesaro invented a program called TDGammon. This was the first neural net to play by Gammon really well. Stronger than even the best players in the world.

[Stephen Dubner]

Where did this come in? The development of AI play.

[Mark Olson]

This was basically around the time when Deep Blue were playing against Kasparov. Gerald Tesaro used backgammon as a case study for his new AI algorithm By Gammon was such a perfect environment for that because it's a multi dimensional game where all these dimensions interact with each other because there's so many trade offs and the variables are entangled, yet it's still a small enough universe that you can just reproduce data as much as you want. You can simulate the games. And it worked exceptionally well.

[Stephen Dubner]

And when you say it worked, that means that in any given moment in any game, there is an optimal move, essentially correct.

[Mark Olson]

Let me explain a little bit how these AI algorithms work. You have, let's call it a play agent. That's the agent making the moves. And then you have a learner. We call it the value function in machine learning. So you're training your value function as a function of the results that the play agent decisions are making. Basically it's a self learning algorithm. The best move is simply the move that has the higher value in the value equation because we have the computer engines, the neural nets that more or less solve the game. The level at the top is so high nowadays that it's much more a game of not making mistakes.

[Stephen Dubner]

Does that take some of the fun out of it?

[Mark Olson]

I don't think so. If you are a really high level player, what is your motivation? For me, it's this mastery achievement thing. I'm not playing against you, I'm playing against myself.

[Stephen Dubner]

Here's how Bob Wachtel described it in his book the Backgammon A Prose Adventure on Tour, Volume 1. Backgammon has evolved from a model like that of soccer, basketball or tennis. He wrote, where it is the fantastic inspired shot that will be the object of awe for years to come. To a sport like gymnastics or ice skating or diving, where the entire goal is to perform a flawless routine. A perfect 10. That is a zero error rating. I went back to Wachtel to talk about this evolution. You know, when we started this conversation, you talked about the 70s and 80s as this golden era of backgammon. There was a lot of action and a lot of excitement and the play was starting to get a lot better. But, but how would you compare the current era? I mean, it must feel very, you know, tame. How do you feel or how do you describe the current era where there is a lot of competition, a lot of tournament play? I assume there's a lot less of the kind of gambling action that you're describing here.

[Bob Wachtell]

Yeah, right. It's much more normalized.

[Stephen Dubner]

Is it boring?

[Bob Wachtell]

Well, I mean, it's not nearly as exciting. I would say that I think it is undergoing a minor renaissance. I don't think it could ever reach the manic levels of the 70s because the whole playboy lifestyle was what got people engaged then. And they were all sort of buying into this vision of the good life, which people are a lot more cynical now and aware of the pratfalls and pitfalls they can encounter.

[Stephen Dubner]

How pleased are you with this mini renaissance? Do you think it's good for the world?

[Bob Wachtell]

Definitely. I am very pleased with it. I think it's great.

[Stephen Dubner]

Coming up after the break, we meet a leader of the backgammon renaissance. This is Freakonomics Radio. My name is Stephen Dubner and we will be right back. Freakonomics radio is sponsored by Granola. You are in back to back meetings all day. You're trying to stay present, but you're also worried you will forget the decision, the action item, the important next step. That's where granola comes in. Granola is an AI powered notepad for meetings. You jot down rough notes like you always do, and in the background, Granola transcribes and turns them into clear, useful notes when the meeting ends. No bots joining your calls, no distractions, just a clean notepad that helps you focus. During or after the call, you can chat with your notes. Ask Granola to pull out action items to help you negotiate, write a follow up email or even coach you. Using recipes which are pre made prompts. Head to Granola AI Freakonomics and get three months free with the code Freakonomics. That's Granola AI Freakonomics. And get three months free with code Freakonomics. Freakonomics radio is sponsored by Range Rover Sport. A vehicle that blends power, poise and performance with a distinctly British design, The Range Rover Sport is built to take on roads anywhere. Free from unnecessary details. Its raw power and agility shine. Combining a dynamic sporting personality with elegance and agility, it delivers an instinctive drive. Its assertive stance hints at an equally refined driving performance. Defining true modern luxury, the Range Rover Sport features the latest innovations in comfort and convenience. The cabin air purification system alongside the Active noise cancellation creates a new level of quality, comfort and control. Terrain Response 2 offers seven terrain modes to choose from, fine tuning the vehicle for any challenging roads ahead. A force inside and out the Range Rover Sport is available with a choice of powerful engines, including a plug in hybrid with an estimated range of 53 miles. Build your Range Rover Sport at rangerover.com US Sport Freakonomics radio is sponsored by Advantech. No one likes a creaky floor and builders know that the subfloor sets the tone, which is why advantech subflooring is engineered for strength, stiffness and moisture resistance. Advantech products are designed to stand up to the elements and give you a bond so strong it's backed by the industry's first squeak free guarantee. No squeaks, fewer callbacks, no problem. When the schedule is tight and performance matters, head to huberwood.com advantech to lay the foundation of a solid build. The Backgammon Program XG or Extreme Gammon was released in 2009 and it became the go to software for serious players. Last year it was bought by Travis Kalanick, founder and former CEO of Uber. He is also a backgammon obsessive. Kalanak is expected to invest significantly in the site with modern AI and machine learning. It definitely feels like we are in the middle of a backgammon renaissance.

[Mark Olson]

We are seeing two different things.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's Mark Olson again.

[Mark Olson]

One is the rise of online backgammon with Backgammon Galaxy and other backgammon apps on the phone. And the other thing is the rise of the social clubs all across the United States right now hosting these incredible social events where people come just to play backgammon. I think it's amazing. It's something we haven't seen before. I don't know how big it can be, but it's very exciting. Especially New York City backgammon club. Remington Davenport is doing a great job.

[Remy Davenport]

Hi, it's Remy.

[Stephen Dubner]

Remy, hi.

[Remy Davenport]

Hi.

[Stephen Dubner]

How are you?

[Remy Davenport]

I'm doing so well, thank you. How are you doing?

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm dying to know why you're doing so well. I mean, I'm very happy about it,

[Remy Davenport]

but I just had like an amazing weekend. I treated myself to a present. It was a backgammon purse and I've been eyeing it for so long. You can like open it and it's a full board and it comes with the pieces and oh, and I got my backgammon table delivered that I designed. So this was just like a very big Backgammon girl weekend.

[Stephen Dubner]

So how did you first get into the game?

[Remy Davenport]

My parents taught me how to play. I never really wanted to play with them. I had a group of six girlfriends in middle school, and we played backgammon every weekend. We were very competitive over everything and nothing. When we played backgammon, we were very physically abusive. We would flip the boards and throw dice at each other. We were so crazy. We were just like, look for anything to compete over. But it was all in, like, good fun. But now I'm like, good sportsmanship and good etiquette is the only thing I believe in. But don't look at me when I was playing as a kid, because I was a monster.

[Stephen Dubner]

Were you playing for stakes, for money or anything?

[Remy Davenport]

No, nothing. Bragging rights.

[Stephen Dubner]

A few years ago, Davenport founded the New York City Backgammon Club.

[Remy Davenport]

To put it simply, it's a social club to play and learn backgammon. It's really focusing on community and bringing people together over this concept of being offline. And at the heart of it is making new friends and meeting new people and pushing yourself to want to improve. I also started gals who gammon. When I go to these tournaments all over the world, I've noticed it's really about a 10% women attendance.

[Stephen Dubner]

In 2024, Davenport attended her first backgammon world championship in Monte Carlo. She says it was life changing.

[Remy Davenport]

Oh, my God. Walking into that room, I was almost in tears. There's 300 people in this room obsessed with the same thing I'm obsessed with. Like, how freaking cool is this? I'm building a community in New York. But then there's this community of us tournament players. These people in the US have been playing with each other for decades. When they go to tournaments, it's a reunion. But then on top of that, going to the world championship, I've made friends from all over the world.

[Stephen Dubner]

This makes it sound as if. And please don't take offense by this, but this makes it sound as if you are backgammon and backgammon is you. And there is no space between the two.

[Remy Davenport]

There is no offense there. Backgammon is my life. And that's it. There's nothing else going on.

[Stephen Dubner]

You know, what do you see yourself as with backgammon in. I don't know. Pick your interval. 2 years, 5 years, 50 years.

[Remy Davenport]

The basics is just growing the game in the United States and then definitely global. I'm starting to expand to other cities. I'm encouraging people from around the world to get into it, start their own club. Do their thing, practice more, play online, play in person, whatever.

[Stephen Dubner]

Backgammon in this country seems to have a craze every half century, right in the 1920s it was big in the 1970s and maybe the craze is really going to be that big again now.

[Remy Davenport]

No, we're in it, we're on the path. The reason it's having a surge now and I started my club three years ago. I can put a lot of my success on the change of society, which is people want in person experiences, they want to be offline, they want to get off dating apps, they want to have experiences. I don't know what happened in the 80s for it to die down, but the reason it's coming back now is there is a big change in society of wanting to get offline and connect with people and be human again. So I started NYC Backgammon Club kind of as a joke. I knew 10 people in New York. I was just looking for a place to play. I had a full time job and I started hosting an event every week in 2023 and people started coming. I'm like, whoa, this is so crazy. And I don't have a social media or marketing background. I'm a sales gal.

[Stephen Dubner]

And what were you selling?

[Remy Davenport]

A lot of bullshit. I was always in startups. It's not even worth talking about. So I started hosting these events and I'll never forget the first event that I had 50 people at and I went home and cried. I didn't even know 50 people in New York then. I was like, okay, this is it. I left my job after a year of starting the club because I just felt like I could not be one foot in the door and one foot out the door of trying to grow back in. I host events Sunday through Thursday night. I'm killing myself still doing events.

[Stephen Dubner]

Does your club have a dedicated physical space?

[Remy Davenport]

No. New Yorkers are tough. You know, people don't go below 14th, they don't go on the east side, they don't go to west side, they don't go to Brooklyn. I'm trying to just do as many events as I can for as many people. And people love to try new places.

[Stephen Dubner]

Remy, the first time we met, you were helping run this national tournament in Jersey City. I see you have some kind of role in the US Back end and federation.

[Remy Davenport]

I'm on the board of directors. I'm trying to make it more approachable for new people. My job in general is I'm trying to bridge this gap of club players in the US and the Tournament world. Can I tell you about my backgammon league?

[Stephen Dubner]

Yes, please.

[Remy Davenport]

It's one of the things I'm most proud about. The first season we had 64 people. I built a whole website and a schedule, and every team has their own home bar. You either play home or away. I keep track of individual scores and team scores and it's tournament play. Five people from each team compete. You play in a seven point match if you're intermediate and nine points if you're advanced. Everyone gets a league shirt, comes with their registration, and then I give out prizes and trophies and stuff. Now we're in the fourth season and this season was actually 235 people, which was really cool.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm sure there have been events even that you've organized where some character comes who just ends up being, whatever, a drag, nasty, creepy, nasty, whatever in some way. How do you handle that?

[Remy Davenport]

It's a great question. Because I'm very, very hardcore and I have a zero tolerance for bull. This sucks to say this is not the case for everyone. I've met a thousand wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people. But there can be one bad apple that really screws your entire tournament experience. And you may never want to come back because a man was super misogynistic for whatever reasons. Maybe you beat him, maybe just simply for sitting down at the table. These are things I've experienced. If there's consequences for bad behavior, then we can start to change. For decades, a lot of people were like, scared that backgammon wasn't growing. So they weren't necessarily kicking people out. If you set the standard of like, really welcoming and loving and fun, it sells itself.

[Stephen Dubner]

When poker started being played online, there was a whole new, not just generation, but a whole new style of poker player who had never played anybody else in person. Then they began showing up to tournaments and sometimes they would win. Are you seeing people who get very, very, very good outside the established realm of playing in person?

[Remy Davenport]

There's definitely people that come to my club being like, you know, I've only been playing on the computer or on my phone and I'm a little nervous. I'm like, don't even worry, we're all nice to your. There is this world of playing online and then trying to get into tournaments, and it's so different.

[Stephen Dubner]

What's different about tournament play?

[Remy Davenport]

In tournaments, sometimes the rooms are absolutely ice cold. Sometimes they're so hot. There's so much stimulation. There's smelly people, there's like just so much crazy going on. And the stamina of just Sitting there and focusing game after game.

[Stephen Dubner]

I recently stopped in at a small tournament that Davenport was hosting on a Monday evening at a hotel in lower Manhattan. My first opponent was a friendly guy named Nick, maybe in his 30s. It's nice to meet you. I don't think we can fit here quite. Do you have a board? I have a board, but it's pretty big.

[Masayuki Mochizuki (Mochi)]

I have one a little smaller.

[Stephen Dubner]

Yeah, that's a good size. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, that'll work. Again, good luck. I have to say, I was feeling pretty good about my game. I had had that solid showing against Mochi in my pairs match in la. Bob Wachtell and I had beat Frank Frigo and Melissa Shin. I'd even taken a game from Mark Olson when we played on Backgammon Galaxy. But Nick beat me, so that knocked me out of the main bracket. I dropped into the consolation bracket, and I promptly busted out of that one as well. But I don't regret a minute of it. Nick and I even made a plan to play squash sometime. It's nice to make a new friend. Thanks. Backgammon. Here's Remy Davenport again.

[Remy Davenport]

Poker and chess are so much bigger than backgammon. They want to get backgammon as mainstream. Backgammon's just way more social game. You play with one hand and there's a drink in your other hand, like, that's. That's the game.

[Stephen Dubner]

And what does mainstream backgammon look like?

[Remy Davenport]

I'm going to have a tournament at msg. I've been talking about this forever. I've been putting it on my dream journal or a manifestation board, whatever it is. I don't know how long that will take, but we're going to do it.

[Stephen Dubner]

You may think that Madison Square Garden hosting a backgammon tournament is absolutely impossible. Until a few weeks ago, the idea of the Garden hosting the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals also seemed impossible. I thought back to something Bob Wachtel had said when I asked him what's so great about backgammon?

[Bob Wachtell]

It's very entertaining. It's entertaining because the things you imagine are impossible happen, and things that you would swear are unlikely can happen just as often as that.

[Stephen Dubner]

I also thought back to something Frank Frigo said when I'd asked him the same question.

[Frank Frigo]

I think of backgammon as a masochistic mindfulness. When I'm playing, I'm not thinking about anything else. Hours could go by, I forget to eat. I forget every other thing going on in my life. I'm going through all of these you know, ups and downs and twists and turns. You're getting these little dopamine rushes. You know, you roll a good number, something goes well, it goes poorly, you feel alive. I'm actually experiencing something.

[Stephen Dubner]

My big thanks to Frank Frigo, Bob Wachtel, Remy Davenport, Mark Olson, Melissa Shin and Mochi for all the good backgammon talk and even more for all the good backgammon. We filmed some of the games so you can head to our Instagram to check it out. You can find and follow us at Freakonomics and even J. Dubner if you. If you are ever looking for a game, let me know. Our email is radioreconomics.com Coming up next time on the show. New York just became the latest state to allow assisted suicide or medical aid in dying. We hear from Kathy Hochul, the governor who made that happen. She was inspired by the death of her mother. To watch her lose her own voice physically and her vision and ability to

[Remy Davenport]

communicate, it was just heartbreaking.

[Stephen Dubner]

We also hear from a death doula about the American way of dying. I cannot live my life to the extent of fullness until I make friends with death. And we hear from an opponent of the new laws.

[Frank Frigo]

I think it's bad medicine, bad ethics and bad public policy and a grave mistake for society.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's [e-mail] where we publish transcripts and show notes. Special thanks to Melissa Shinn, Evan Manners, Mark Sparrow, Dylan Endyke, Dennis Haggerty, Sam Anderson, and to Amy Cervini for her voiceover. This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs with help from Zach Lipinski and Augusta Chapman, and it was edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Jake Loomis with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Dalvin Abuaji, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Hilaria Montenacourt, Mandy Gorenstein, and Pete Madden. As always, thanks for listening.

[Mark Olson]

I hate making ugly moves.

[Stephen Dubner]

It's your Danish sense of style that won't allow you.

[Mark Olson]

Exactly. I have a physical reaction to this play right now.

[Remy Davenport]

The Freakonomics Radio Network.

[Mark Olson]

The hidden side of everything.

[Stephen Dubner]

Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to GLP1s ozempic pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets 4 and 9 milligrams by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA approved Ozempic pill.

[Bob Wachtell]

A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a brand new podcast from 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. Each week we're looking at a different object from across American history with a unique story to tell about who we've

[Frank Frigo]

been, what we've built and what we've

[Bob Wachtell]

allowed ourselves to forget.

[Frank Frigo]

Some of these objects are well known,

[Bob Wachtell]

many are not, but all of them carry the story of how we got to this moment. Find A History of the United States and 100 objects on the 99% invisible feed wherever you get your podcasts.

[Stephen Dubner]

This podcast is sponsored by Made in

[Remy Davenport]

Cookware, Made in partners with multi generational artisans and some of the world's best

[Stephen Dubner]

chefs to create professional quality cookware knives and kitchen tools. Their products are trusted in Michelin starred restaurants worldwide and designed to perform just as well in your kitchen.

[Remy Davenport]

From five ply stainless clad to carbon steel, every piece is built to last and made to actually make you a better cook.

[Stephen Dubner]

Discover award winning [e-mail].