Hitting, blots and the bar

A checker on its own can be sent back to the beginning. Everything about how that happens, and how you come back from it.

This assumes the board and the numbering from how to play backgammon: points numbered from your seat, 24 furthest away down to 1 nearest home, and your checkers travelling from 24 towards 1. Your opponent numbers the same points the other way round, which is the single thing to keep hold of on this page.

Blots and points

How many of your checkers are standing on a point decides what your opponent may do with it.

One checker: a blot.

Your opponent may land there, and doing so sends your checker to the bar.

Two or more: a point, and it is yours.

Your opponent cannot land there at all, however many checkers they have and whatever they roll. Two is as good as five for this; the extra checkers do nothing but wait.

None: open to both of you.

Either player may land there.

Two checkers is the whole difference between a checker that can be sent back to the start and a square of board your opponent may not touch.

Hitting

Landing on a blot hits it. The checker you hit comes off the board and goes on the bar, and it has to start its journey again from the far end.

Hitting is not a separate move and costs you nothing extra: you play a die, it happens to land on a lone opposing checker, and that checker is hit. You may hit with either die, you may hit twice in a turn, and you may hit on your way past somewhere you would rather have gone.

What a hit is worth is measured in the distance the checker has to make up. Hitting a checker that had come almost all the way home costs your opponent most of a game's worth of moves. Hitting one that has barely started costs them very little, and may cost you more than it gains if you have to leave a blot of your own to do it.

The bar comes first

While you have a checker on the bar you may move nothing else. Not a checker that is about to be hit, not a checker one pip from home. The bar is dealt with first, and only once every checker of yours is back on the board does the rest of your turn happen.

Coming back on

A checker on the bar re-enters in your opponent's home board - the far end from where it is trying to get to. The die is the point it lands on, counted from that end:

A one enters on point 24.

The furthest point from home, and the smallest step back into the game.

A six enters on point 19.

Six points nearer home, and the best of the six.

So the numbers run the opposite way from everything else on this page: the higher the die, the further along you come back. A one is the worst roll and a six the best, which is the reverse of how it feels everywhere else in the game.

You can only enter on a point your opponent does not hold. If they have two or more checkers on point 22, a three does not bring you back. If the point has a single opposing checker on it, you enter and hit it.

Being shut out

If your opponent holds all six points of their home board - your points 19 to 24 - there is nowhere for your checker to land and you forfeit the whole turn. You roll, there is no legal move, and play passes back. That goes on for as long as they can hold all six, which is why a closed home board is the strongest position in backgammon and worth a great deal of trouble to build.

It is also why leaving a blot in front of a well-made opponent board is so much worse than leaving one in front of an open one: the punishment is not the hit, it is the turns you then spend not playing.

Anchors

An anchor is two of your checkers on a point in your opponent's home board. While you hold one you always have somewhere to come back to, so you can never be shut out, and you have a checker in place to hit anything they leave loose as they bring their own checkers home.

It is the reason the two checkers you start with on point 24 are worth keeping together, and the reason moving them up to point 20 - your opponent's 5-point - is one of the better things that can happen to you early on.

Primes

A prime is a run of consecutive points you hold. Six in a row cannot be jumped by any die, so an opposing checker behind a six-prime cannot move at all until you break it. Shorter runs are worth having for the same reason in miniature: every point in a row is one more number that does not help them.

A prime and a closed home board are the two ways of making your opponent's dice useless, and between them they are most of what good players are doing while it looks like nothing is happening.