The Backgammon Chronicles: A Pro's Adventures on Tour is a lush, two-volume, full-color cornucopia of gambling stories, character sketches, historical essays and tournament drama that takes the reader on an insider's odyssey through backgammon's last whirlwind decade--with its author, one of the game's elite competitors, as guide.
Introducing you to the game's stars even as he narrates his clashes with them in a score of exotic venues, Robert Wachtel frames the action against an overview of the events and crises that have defined contemporary backgammon: the advent of the artificial-intelligence programs and their virtual extinction of the game's traditional role as a gambling recreation; the ecstatic birth and untimely death of online play; the burst of investment and enthusiasm brought to the game by the poker boom; and current trends: the outreach of Western backgammon culture back towards the game's birthplace, the Middle East; and the efforts of the federations of the major nations to establish a viable global community.
Volume 1 begins in 2008, when the formulas that had fueled a worldwide poker boom were being tested in Europe and the Middle East on the internationally more popular and beloved game of backgammon.
The scene was intoxicating: games for every stake, from pennies to thousands of dollars, were available 24/7 online, with live tournaments held year-round in lavish resorts, their prize pools fortified by great dollops of money added by casinos, hotels, and assorted gambling platforms.
Entrepreneurs--their eyes starry with visions of the sort of high-stakes tours, galas, books, films and TV series that had reaped easy profits for media and gaming concerns in promoting poker--were taking meetings and arranging financing.
The author is both a peer and a friend of backgammon's best and brightest.
The reader will meet those brilliant, quirky characters up close in these pages as Robert faces off against them in tournament play and engages them in a special.
| Chronicles | A |
|---|---|
| Wachtel frames the action against an overview of the events and crises that have defined contemporary backgammon | The advent of the artificialintelligence programs and their virtual extinction of the games traditional role as a gambling recreation |
| And current trends | The outreach of |
| The scene was intoxicating | Games for every stake from pennies to thousands of dollars were available 247 online with live tournaments held yearround in lavish resorts their prize pools fortified by great dollops of money added by casinos hotels and assorted gambling platforms |
Robert Wachtel The backgammon chronicles: a pro's adventures on tour, volume 1 of 2, paperback/robert h. wachtel
