“Three months? Are you kidding? I’ve never seen anybody this good in three months at backgammon. This guy is brilliant.” – commentator Phil ”The Professor of Backgammon” Simborg.
Phil Simborg takes a sip of water and leans back in his chair for a moment. He, along with his colleague, backgammon pro Michel Lamonte, are in the midst of providing commentary and analysis of one of the most prestigious backgammon matches of the year – the semi-finals of the 54th Backgammon World Championship Open in Monte Carlo. And, it looks like Simborg needs a break – this match has been a wild one.
The favorite: Kazuki Yokota, the backgammon savant from Japan who Simborg introduced at the top of the match as “arguably one of the best players in the world.” On the other side of the board, an upstart amateur and, according to Simbog, somebody “nobody’s ever heard of.” It’s former poker pro turned hedge fund manager from New York, Galen Hall.
Perhaps in the world of backgammon, nobody had ever heard of Hall – that’s fair. But in poker, the high-stakes tournament crusher is more than a well-known commodity. With more than $6.8 million in tournament earnings including a WSOP gold bracelet and, perhaps more notably, his 2011 victory in the PokerStars PCA, Hall has proven himself to be a world-class game player in his own right.
Now Hall has taken his talents to backgammon and, after only having started playing seriously three months prior to entering, he’s shocked the entire backgammon community and pushed the world-class Yokota to the brink of elimination.
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Rewind three months from the start of the match and you find Hall, the mid-30’s partner in charge of a hedge fund, basically discovering backgammon for the first time. Noticing that the BGWC backgammon tournament in Monte Carlo would be taking place at the same time as a planned business trip to France, Hall thought backgammon would be fun to learn so he, and his business partner, took up the game and, at first, just played for an hour or so after work.
“It’s really, really fun,” Hall said. “I always liked the part of learning where you’re going from zero to 60. You’re trying to master the concept, you’re trying to figure out what the key variables are. You’re trying to just figure out a mental framework for how to think about the problems and that’s the stage I was at in backgammon, which is the most fun for me.”
From friendly games after work to eventually playing online where he could study his play. Hall invested time in getting better, using, essentially, backgammongalaxy.com’s post-match solver to see why a computer prefers one move to another. Not being a stranger to studying gameplay, Hall found enjoyment in picking up the intricacies of a new game.
“It’s a fun little puzzle to try and see what the correct move is and then see if you can reason your way backward to the principles of why that’s the correct move, and then you grow your understanding of the game that way.”
So Hall and his wife, who are expecting a child later this year, combined the work trip with a vacation where Hall could enter the tournament. According to Hall, the Monte Carlo Open is the second biggest backgammon tournament of the year but unlike major poker tournaments, the buy-in was “way more low stakes” at just €500. In general, backgammon tournaments are scaled down from what poker players are accustomed to with the USA Championship registration fee running just a couple hundred dollars. But it seems pretty clear that it’s not the money that drew Hall to backgammon.
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The entire match was a see-saw battle with Yokota jumping out to a healthy lead and Hall battling back. You don’t need to know all the ins and outs of the game to be drawn into the David vs. Goliath drama that was playing out with every roll of the dice. The deeper the match went, the more commentators Simborg and Lamonte went from being critical of Hall’s unorthodox play and lack of understanding of game specifics to becoming big-time fans of playing style as the match went on.
“It’s fun to watch [back] because, at the beginning, [Simborg and Lamonte] were really annoyed with me. I didn’t know any of the etiquette, which obviously how would I know any of the etiquette because I haven’t really played before,” Hall said. “I was moving the pieces with two hands. All you got to do is tell me not to do that. I don’t know. I think because there are very few new backgammon players, so they’re kind of like, ‘Oh, this guy is moving the pieces with two hands. He doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s made a couple of checker blenders. He must be some kind of moron.’ Which, if you had been playing backgammon for 40 years and you still played like that, you probably are a moron. But once they figured out actually this is a smart person who is new to the game, and he’s making some obvious mistakes, but he’s also making some good correct difficult plays, and it was just a new thing for them.”
Hall freely admits that while he felt he was playing at a high level in Monte Carlo, he also ran hot to get to the semis. In his match against Yokota, Hall was at a major experience disadvantage leading him to take extra time on “even the basic” moves and feel the pressure of the clock. But all of that was what made the event so fun for him.
“It’s enjoyable to think about the match strategically where I’m not just trying to make the right computer play every time, but I know I’m playing against the guy who’s going to play nearly perfectly, so I’m trying to make the plays that maximize my odds of winning the match.
“My overall strategy was looking for spots where I could create a lot of volatility and I was really erring on the side of being aggressive, erring on the side of putting pressure and trying to turn up the ball. It was fun.”
His strategy was working, as noted by Simbog. “What we’re seeing from Galen is he likes to gamble, he likes to take chances.” Much like the longtime heads-up strategy in poker, when you are at a skill disadvantage, one might try to increase the variance. Hall, heads-up against Yokota, was applying pressure on his opponent with the doubling cube (a game device that allows a player, at any point in the game before their role, to double the points/stakes in the match).
“Well I see now how Galen got this far in this tournament,” Simborg commented. “He is a cube master. Even his wrong cubes I like.”
“I think in poker, he’s probably loose-aggressive,” Lamonte added.
“This guy’s got guts and brains.”
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Hall has experience with the world watching his every move in real-time. His 2011 victory at the PokerStars PCA was one of, if not the first livestreamed final table with cards up. The players sequestered, phones confiscated, the poker world watched a 12-hour final table which included, at the time, a jaw-dropping fold by Hall against his heads-up opponent, online pro Chris Oliver. It’s really the hand that brought Hall to the attention of the poker world in the first place.
And in the light of Hall once again doing more amazing things on a livestream, when asked to look back on that moment, he’s essentially unimpressed with himself. Sure “it was cool” but he notes it was either right or wrong. Standard or non-standard. For the general public, especially at the time years before poker solvers could inform you about a spot, it was incredible. For Hall, he was simply trying to make a correct decision.
“It’s funny, everybody goes crazy over that hand, but there’s a right decision and a wrong decision. I had been playing with [Chris Oliver] for a couple of days straight and I felt very, very confident I could go through the nuance of the read and how he was actually really overly aggressive in a lot of spots, but in these particular types of hands, I actually think he was super under-aggressive,” he said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, pretty clearly I think this is the right decision and the other decision is the wrong decision.’ I guess it’s a long-winded way of saying it just seemed right to me. I get the stress and the pressure and things like that. But again, I’m just trying to make the right decision. I don’t know, it just seemed right.”
“Oh yeah, there’s this great irony where if you talk to any high-stakes player, they’ll all know me and they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, Galen is batshit crazy. He fucking is way too overly aggressive. He just attack, attack, attack. Probably one of the most aggressive players there is. He’s just relentless to the point of over the top and maybe bad.’ Funny, I’m most well known for a fold, but it’s funny.”
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That was then, but now he’d battled back to tie this first-to-11 backgammon match at 9 games a piece. It took just 45 minutes of play for Hall to go from being considered some luckbox New Yorker to the Cinderella story of a gutsy gambler who had a chance to make backgammon history.
However, it was not to be. In what turned into his last game against Yokota, the Japanese pro played nearly flawlessly and in a pivotal spot rolled “one banger of a roll that let him win.” But Hall, who has a healthy (and in-depth) take on the luck versus skill aspect of both backgammon and poker noted that in the match report – which calculated both errors and luck factors – that Yokota played nearly perfectly and Hall was gifted a little more luck which, in part, played out in having the match come down to the wire.
“I think for Galen it must be quite intimidating, you know, you are being watched by the backgammon community,” Lamonte said in the midst of the match.
“This guy is a cool guy, I don’t think he’s intimidated,” Simborg replied. “He knows he’s lucky to be here. He’s having fun. He obviously has a little money, running a hedge fund and after winning two million bucks in a poker tournament so it’s not about the money…I don’t think he feels pressure at all. He’s having a ball. He’s got the right attitude.”
Simborg was right. When talking about the pressure of the moment, Hall almost disregards the notion of there having been any real pressure at all. Real life comes with pressure, but games, for Hall, have an entirely different energy.
“When I’m playing games, I basically never feel any stress, but I feel alive. You know what I mean?” he said. “My adrenaline is pumping, my blood is pumping. It’s the only time that I really can have my entire brain focused on one thing. I’m not thinking about anything else. My entire brain is focused on one task and it’s a feeling which I only really can get from…you have it once in a while in sports like when I was a high school athlete…but mostly it just comes in poker.
“And this was the only other time I found it where your whole brain is clued into a thing, your heart is pumping and it’s exciting, but it’s just this feeling of flow or this feeling of being alive that’s really just having your whole body being taken over by something. It’s not stress in the sense that I’m worried or I’m anxious or I’m hoping I win or worried if I lose or thinking about what happens. It’s just all of your energy is being channeled into trying to make good decisions in the game. And for me, that’s my favorite feeling that I can get.”