Bob Wachtel

Backgammon Grandmaster and Acclaimed Author

Bob Wachtel has been one of backgammon’s elite players for the last 40 years. A chess master at 16, Bob received a B.S. in chemistry from Rutgers University in 1969 and a PhD in the philosophy of science from the University of Toronto in 1976. Introduced to backgammon at the University of Toronto chess club in 1976, he abandoned his academic ambitions as the game’s popularity crested in the late 70s, moving to Los Angeles a couple of years later, where he took on all comers at the famed Beverly Hills private clubs, Pips and the Cavendish West. After trying his hand at blackjack and options trading in the late 1980s, Bob moved to London in 1991. In the next busy year he researched and wrote his first backgammon book, In the Game until the End (a unique study of late-contact ace-point games), and won three major European backgammon tournaments: the Swedish Open, the British Open, and the First (and, it turned out, the only) Backgammon Olympiad, held in Venice, Italy. Back in Los Angeles in 1993 and pleased with the book’s reception. Bob began contributing articles to Inside Backgammon, an excellent quarterly published by Kent Goulding and Bill Robertie. In 1999, he and fellow LA expert Joe Russell won the high-stakes Pro-Am doubles event at the Rio Casino, Las Vegas; and in 2001, again in Vegas, he won both the singles and doubles titles at the Worldwide Twin Championships. On trips to Europe in the aughts, he was runner-up at both the 2004 Monte Carlo World Championship and the invitational Crown’s Cup event, held in Berlin in 2007. From 2007 through 2017, Bob was voted among the world’s top 15 players each year on the poll-based survey, the “Giants of Backgammon List.” The wild popularity of online backgammon towards the end of the decade afforded Bob a dream job: as a consultant to and roving correspondent for the thriving Tel-Aviv-based platform Play65. But online money games, plagued by the ease with which cheaters could populate playing sites with “bots,” were doomed. Play65 folded in 2012 and its competitors soon followed. Now an established author, Bob started working for the United States Backgammon Federation in 2011 as senior copy editor for the organization’s flagship magazine, PrimeTime Backgammon, a position he held for the next seven years. Still active on the international tournament scene, he produced a whole new series of entertaining dispatches, part backgammon storytelling and part travelogue, from various ports of call, including Stockholm, Prague, Copenhagen, Paris, Velden (Austria), Montreux (Switzerland), Oulu (Finland), Oslo, Santa Fe, Majorca, North Cyprus, Meribel (French Alps), and Tbilisi (Republic of Georgia). By far the most exceptional of the events that Bob covered for PrimeTime was an annual team challenge match, held in Copenhagen each Easter that pitted backgammon powerhouse Denmark against “The Rest of the World.” Bob made the World team four times, in 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2015, and shared in his PrimeTime articles the fascinating ground-zero interplay, under terrific pressure, of the participants’ visceral emotions and brilliant intelligence as they debated strategy and tactics at the highest level. In 2014 Bob published In the Game until the End, Volume II: Ace-Point Endgame Analysis—the Next Generation, which employed deep eXtreme Gammon rollouts to vet and extend his prior endgame investigations (Volume I had been written in the pre-bot era). And then, in 2019, a trio of glorious books appeared: The Backgammon Chronicles: A Pro’s Adventures on Tour, “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,” and The Language of Backgammon, a Devil’s Dictionary of contemporary analytic terminology and traditional gambling jargon. Though busily engaged in a number of literary projects, Bob still enjoys competing in various online and live events and giving lessons. He is rated Grandmaster 2nd class by the BMAB.