When neural network software came on the backgammon stage in the middle 90s they were quite equalizing. Talent and experience became irrelevant overnight and suddenly everyone could discover the complex secrets and difficult positions and study the game systematically, as if they were reading a book.

Players quickly learned that evaluation (their first impression) of positions made by bots wasn’t always right. However, there was a solution for this problem: entering those positions in the computer, configure it to make thousands of rollouts and go to bed. In the morning players would have the answer.

A new generation of backgammon players, most of them German or Scandinavian, made their entrance in a few years. Cold, analytic, young and only trained by bots, those players picked information efficiently, organized it and won backgammon tournaments.

However, this didn’t work for many world class backgammon players from previous generations. They were seen as weak players and impossible to teach. Some of them were in denial and spent most of their valuable time, which they should have used to relearn the backgammon game, cursing their computers and complaining about falling from their “genius” pedestals.

Even some old players who were used to that style had serious trouble to adapt themselves and quit old habits they acquired during their lives. They had spent their backgammon learning years developing wrong concepts, incorrect empirical rules and winning with inaccuracies their opponents never punished.

Bots didn’t just end with the oldest generations of backgammon players but also ended with the profits the game could generate, not only because weaker players improved their games but also because those players finally realized how bad they were at backgammon.

For years, those bad players had deceived themselves and the world believing they were in the same level than the players with whom they constantly lost. However, when bots made them notice they were playing with a 12 to 3 margin of error, even the toughest player felt ashamed and had no more excuses.

Nowadays, and thanks to online casinos, online backgammon is a very popular game played by millions of players around the world. The new generations have discovered backgammon as a game that requires skills and strategy and is a challenge to their minds and intellects.