Backgammon, believe it or not, was the first game I really was passionate about. I learned to play in 1987 -- bought a magnetic travel board with super-tiny dice on a very long family vacation, and wouldn't let my mother do anything else for the rest of the trip.
I went on to be the founder and tournament director of backgammon clubs at my junior high and high school. (Not surprisingly, the clubs did not survive after I graduated. Years later I found $18.00 in a plain white envelope marked "Backgammon Club" --- oops! Apparently I accidentally misappropriated the 1992-1993 club dues.
After learning bridge, I paid backgammon almost no attention for years, though I did play intermittently on FIBS through my college years. I resumed my serious interest in the game in the summer of 2005.
Places to play -- live:
Sadly there are no backgammon clubs in Alaska at present. If you'd like to see one start up, send me an email.
There are, however, live backgammon clubs in Seattle and Vancouver. There is also the annual Pacific Northwest Backgammon Championship, held in Seattle the last weekend of September. Details at Backgammon Northwest.
Places to play -- online:
My primary site these days is DailyGammon. It's a 21st-century version of play-by-mail: sign up for as many or as few matches as you'd like, make a move in each match once a day and wait for your opponent to reply.
FIBS, the First Internet Backgammon Server, is still going strong. Play a game in real time over the internet any time of day or night. Always dozens of people available for a match.
There are various other free games sites such as Yahoo, which I cannot, in clear conscience, recommend.
For real-money play, there are GamesGrid, Play65, Gammon Empire, and PartyGammon (all connected to poker sites or sports books, not surprisingly.) Of these GamesGrid is the best-established and offers the most favourable fees -- but charges an annual membership fee to join, which stops a lot of the casual players. The other sites charge such horrendously high rake on money play that I advise against playing for real money at any of them.
Playing against the computer:
Why pay for a copy of Snowie or Jellyfish when GNU Backgammon plays just as well and is available for free? Open source, too, if you're interested in writing your own software or in being able to contact the programmers and ask them questions about the implementation.
Links to backgammon research / strategy
Someday I will post some of my own results here. Sorry, no promises when. In the meantime here are some other links well worth your while:
Extensive archive of strategy articles, including an analysis of all possible replies to each opening, an extensive collection of quality posts on the rec.games.backgammon newsgroup, and a collection of annotated matches between experts. They have a much more complete set of links than I maintain here, too.
Web-based magazine with all the latest news from tournaments, articles by experts, tutorials for improving players, and so on. Pricey to subscribe but the quality is high.
Another web-based magazine. This one is run by Kit Woolsey (yes, the same one who wrote Matchpoints and Partnership Defense at Bridge) and Tami Jones. They kindly provide a complete sample issue of the magazine.
No, not Max Hardy, the late bridge expert... Hardy Huebner has a nice site with backgammon book recommendations, articles, and so on. Available in both English and German.
Trictrac was a medieval ancestor of backgammon, played primarily in pre-revolutionary France. The board looks the same, and there are dice, but the rules are are quite different from backgammon -- about as far apart as, say, bridge and pinochle. Try it, you'll like it.