Recommended Books
It’s difficult to pick one backgammon book because the choice would depend on the level of the player asking for a recommendation and what they want from the book. Of course, I also have my own personal favourites which others may disagree with. So here are a few suggestions:
Peter Bennet's Top 5
Backgammon
Paul Magriel
Magriel’s Backgammon: the book which changed my game (back in 1978) more than any other. It was eye-opening at the time and is even more impressive now, in that even after all this time, and with the benefit of the bots, it is mostly correct and teaches you to play better backgammon. But it’s probably not the best book for a modern player.
Backgammon Boot Camp
Walter Trice
Probably the most useful book I have bought for race cube guidance. Trice’s “rule 62” is simple to work out over the board, can be tweaked using other adjustments/intuition, and is pretty much all I use for racing cube decisions. The rest of the book is very good too, most chapters starting with relatively easy stuff and progressing to more advanced ideas. Was out of print for a while but a revised edition with corrections is now available.
Classic Backgammon Revisited
Jeremy Paul Bagai
Bagai’s Classic Backgammon Revisited is my personal favourite of all my BG books, partly because in an earlier age I had absorbed all the 70s books which Bagai picks apart (Magriel, Dwek, Cook, Robertie and Jacoby& Crawford). Bagai writes very well, and economically, and sometimes very amusingly: “Robertie hallucinates a pass”; “This serves as the Barclay Cooke vision test…if you even see the play B/21 13/7, congratulations – you are ready to play in the 1970s”; “If you are familiar with [optical] illusions you’ll know what I mean when I say that this is the Necker Cube of backgammon.” I refer to Bagai probably more than any other of my BG books (e.g. when a position reminds me of one of his).
What’s your Game Plan
Mary Hickey & Marty Storer
Storer & Hickey’s What’s your Game Plan is a good intermediate/advanced level book in the form of a quiz with 122 positions and for each of these explains in one or two pages WHY the correct move is correct. I quite like it, and others I have recommended it to have said they love it. Sadly, this book is now out of print but used copies occasionally appear for sale online.
Backgammon Odyssey
Michihito Kageyama
I think Michy’s Backgammon Odyssey series of books (so far three have been published) are very good, although quite expensive and not everyone likes the quirky writing.