Zen of Backgammon

I don't exactly remember when I learned playing backgammon. My mother says, she and I started to play against dad when I was four. But I do remember that I used to cry when we lost, sometimes blaming mom for mistakes. More often my anger was targeted towards the dice. It was evil. It always worked against my plans. "It is not fair" I would have said "all we needed to win was anything above 2 and I rolled a 2-1".

Backgammon was the first abstract game I have learned -- and what an excitement it was. Until that point, games were typically based on physical activities - you needed to catch someone, hide from someone or grab something - not very different from what kittens play. Perhaps our most "human" games involved roleplaying: we would be soldiers or cowboys. Backgammon was different. It was not connected to anything in the real world. Why would moving your tokens to the last quadrant would let you take them into your hand and win the game? Total nonsense. Backgammon was fascinatingly absurd.

In a very short period of time I was hooked. I was waiting everyday for my dad to come home so that I can have my daily dose of backgammon -- a 5 round match. Initially I was focusing on my tokens alone, trying to get them to the last quadrant. As I started to play without mom and grasped the basic strategies, I realized that dad was laying traps for me or planning his moves to make my life more difficult. I remember the resentment I felt towards him and my desire to thwart his evil plans. After a while, like Anakin Skywalker embracing the dark side, I also became an evil player. I was laying traps to capture his pieces or would be filled with righteous revenge when dice rolled particularly badly for him.

Everytime my game got better, dad adjusted the challenge by dropping some of his self-imposed handicaps and eventually started playing normally. I was still losing most of the games but I knew that he was doing his best and the game was fair. I started to put myself into my his boots and think what I would play if I was in his position. Once again, the game changed - now it was an analysis of situations and decisions. I was not complaining about luck anymore, I was complaining about lame games when there was not enough decisions to make. I started offering dad some adjustments to his strategies, and when he refused to acknowledge my revolutionary methods I attempted to create positions in the game to demonstrate my point. I often failed and ditched most of these strategies, but few of them succeded and became a permanent part of my game.

What I did not know was there was yet another stage. A stage when situational decisions become reflexive and instead you start worrying about the flow of the game, when given similarly feasible strategies you always go for the more aesthetic option and expect from your opponent to do the same. A good game was no longer about wining or losing, or about being right about the best strategy. It was about exchanging complex challenges with your opponent. It was something beautiful in itself, and as satisfying as reading a poem you love. After thousands of games I realized, once again, that my dad was playing a different game than I was playing. All the years he was subtly, patiently tutoring me, never explicitly mentioning these. One can not learn such things --one needs to discover them.

Whenever I go back to Turkey to visit my parents, we sit together with dad and play backgammon, a 5 round match every night. I don't know what he feels during our games; we don't talk about it. But for me it is a ritual where I remember that life is not about winning or being right and it is lame only if you live it lamely.