While many of us play backgammon for fun on a cold, wintry evening, there are those who play professionally and make their living from it. One of the essential tools of a professional player is a Backgammon odds calculator. This allows the player to calculate which is the best move to make based on the statistics that are visible on the board. Watching a professional backgammon weighing up the odds is akin to watching a chess grandmaster.

The backgammon odds calculator can be a complicated concept to those who play purely for fun, and how to interpret the odds and probabilities to gain the best advantage can take years to master. You can use a backgammon odds calculator to work out the chances of hitting a blot, entering from the bar or throwing the score you need with the dice. Thankfully, no odds calculator will tell you the chances of winning that as always is 50/50.

When we log in to an online casino we do so for two reasons; the first is to enjoy ourselves and the second is to make some money. Of course depending on who we are, these may vary in their relative importance. For some making money is the primary drive, whilst for others the most important factor is the immersive experience of gambling online and winning money is secondary.

Whatever our motivation, to just select a game and play it randomly without any pre-determined strategy or tactics is likely to lead to disappointment. Certainly we will be more likely to lose than to win (though of course we might just get lucky) and we will miss the real satisfaction that comes when, by playing out our strategy, we achieve our goals. Even if you are one of those people who like to say that you don’t mind if you win or lose, in reality the gulf between the emotions associated with winning and with losing are so vast that you are really kidding yourself by taking this stance. If we are not motivated by winning, then we are wasting our time.

Given that we are here to win, what is the best way of maximising our chances of doing so? In some future articles we will look at some of the best winning strategies in detail, but first it is necessary to look at some of the fundamentals.

These are:

Game selection: There is over a magnitude of difference between your chances of winning on some games than on others. Discover which games offer the best winning chances and chose to play those.

Game understanding: You are unlikely to win unless you understand at least the fundamental aspect of the game. Some games such as poker can take many years to properly understand, whist others like online slots are quite simple. Whatever game you play you should invest some effort to learn about its intricacies.

Money management: How you manage your money is an extremely important facet of developing a winning strategy. This involves deciding on the size of your bets as a proportion of your available bankroll and knowing when to continue and when to quit.

Get these fundamentals right and you will be on your way to developing a winning online casino strategy.