Backgammon – Are the dice fair?
Online poker has been accused many times of not having totally random generated hands, so what about online backgammon?

It’s a common accusation that games online are fixed, however I do not believe this to be true. In live play, the players roll the dice and are closely scrutinized by their opponents as well as officials in tournaments. In online play, it’s a matter of trust that the server actually uses a random number generator. Most sites actually use the same generator as it is a certified piece of code and has been tested over and over and approved by outside organizations. Any time it has been in question, it has been proven to be fair.

There will always be people who think that the game is fixed and that some evil programmer has manipulated the software. This is because you could play 10 games and win 9 of them but there was that one game you lost. In that one game, you had a really good lead and had doubled the cube and your opponent had stupidly accepted it. Then the game took a huge turn and now you couldn’t roll to save your life and your opponent seemed to hit double after double. Wow, is this fixed or what?

Despite you were the better player and won 9 out of 10, that one game sticks to your mind and you can’t believe that happened. When you look at the odds or percentage on a game, even though you may be way ahead the percentage is not 100% for you and 0% for your opponent. Your opponent may be 3% or less but the fact remains there is a reason it’s not 0% and that is, sometimes people get lucky.

In online poker, there are rumours that there is software that will let you see the other player’s cards. Backgammon is not immune to rumours, there are rumours that there is software that let’s you control the dice.

Some software is actually open source, which means anyone can look at the code of the program and verify the random card generator. If there is still doubt in your mind, then I guess you are just going to have to do your own analysis.