Backgammon may be New York’s new favourite game

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to New York

For years, I’ve spent my Saturdays in a dark room in Brooklyn, staring at triangles. I spend them celebrating and arguing with friends and strangers alike. I spend them building barricades and avoiding capture. I spend them rolling dice on to baize and calculating combinatorics and probabilities and moving circular pieces. I spend them consulting neural networks to settle spirited debates. I do all of this because I am a player of backgammon, the finest board game ever invented.

The game is great because it is perfectly and doubly balanced — between luck and skill, between simplicity and depth. It is the apotheosis of “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master”. Indeed, the game’s combination of race and battle has occupied humans for millennia, and occupies them today in robust numbers across New York. Tracing them through the bars, clubs and parks that host these games frames an excellent tour of the city.

We might begin in a secluded corner of the Greek and Roman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where a dozen terracotta balls sit. They are small and unassuming things, like stones that rolled in from Central Park and were swept up and placed behind glass. In reality they may be game tokens, likely for something similar to backgammon, and they are thousands of years old. Dice in particular, the museum’s text reads, were fixtures of ancient life. They remain part of the material of New York, skittering every day on tabletops across town.

Let’s continue through the different backgammon scenes across New York today. The game is a fitting pastime for urban life, all traffic and jostle. Its language suits the city, too, with all its jazzy monosyllables: blot, hit, split, prime, slot, pip, lift, stay, run. 

The dive bar

The Clinton Hill Backgammon Club is headquartered at the cosy Emerson tavern on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. Through its heavy front door, the bar is dim even on the brightest afternoon. But every Saturday, small lamps sprout above a half dozen felt-topped boards, all the better to see the checkers and dice. Chatter on the benefits of this move versus that one fill the room. This friendly dive-bar club is where, a few years ago, I learnt to play. It is the city’s finest institution of backgammon education.

The Clinton Hill group traces its origin to pandemic lockdowns. Bar regulars began throwing dice on the pavement out front, and started a backgammon club more or less as a joke: they gave it a biker-gang aesthetic and an Instagram account, and sold shirts with skulls and dice. The sharks who frequented the bar’s pool table, itching to play something, joined in, too. The money they all raised helped save the bar.

The joke stuck, and players like me just kept coming. Its contingent now polishes trophies from tournaments across the country, and world champions have sat down at The Emerson’s sticky tables.

Joe Incze, the club’s co-founder, learnt the game from a Brooklyn missionary of dice, a man who travels bar to bar with a backgammon set. “Learning about mitigating risk and calculating probability and all of that, taking in all that information, was really exciting,” Incze told me.

I played a match against the co-author of saxophonist Kenny G’s autobiography, and one against a portfolio manager who was popping weed edibles

In backgammon, two players manoeuvre 15 checkers around a 24-stop racetrack, in opposite directions. Their moves are allowed by the roll of two dice. The first player to get all their checkers past the finish line wins. But any checker left alone can be hit by the opponent’s, and sent back to the beginning of the track. The dice and the checkers combine into a game of astonishing arithmetical depth.

Learning is the ethos at the Emerson, and newcomers are warmly welcomed. Backgammon’s randomness offers dual advantages: it allows beginners to play enjoyably with experts, and it allows for betting markets. “I care about it being chill,” said Babs Laco, the other co-founder. “The community is a special part of it.”

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I entered the club’s third annual “Summer Classique” tournament. I played a match against the co-author of saxophonist Kenny G’s autobiography, and one against a portfolio manager who was drinking the New York dive bar special (a beer and a whiskey shot) and popping weed edibles. Both lovely chaps; both victors at my expense.

Those eliminated from the tournament quickly coalesced into chouettes — a variation of backgammon for more than two players, in which a team (led by “the captain”) plays cooperatively against a single player (“the box”). Chouettes are the Saturday-night fixture at The Emerson, and, because they force co-operation, spur valuable lessons. Typical stakes are $3 a point, which usually means a night comfortably in positive or negative double-digits.

Sitting in that box at one garden table as night fell was Mal Woolley. Woolley started playing at The Emerson two years ago after a break-up, and they’ve since travelled to tournaments across the country and beyond. “People who play chess suck,” they said. “And that’s on the record.”

Anxious Knicks fans packed the bar for the NBA conference finals, screaming at the television. The backgammon players were unfazed. The only sound they made was shaking dice in padded leather cups.

The scenesters

Later that week, the NYC Backgammon Club convened at Beefbar (as in Wagyu), in spendy Tribeca, a short walk from the FT newsroom. I came here to see the city’s upmarket backgammon experience. The place was all marble, dark wood and recessed lighting. Aperol cocktails glistened in the Lucite of a transparent backgammon board, at the moment unused by its occupants. Expensive Japanese whiskies reflected off mirrored ceilings.

The club is run by Remington Davenport, a millennial citywide backgammon socialite. New York is a place where the rich and modish find each other, something Davenport facilitates with an ancient game. Given its cumulative attendance, she claims her club — which sojourns to various hip venues — as the largest in the country.

“The World Backgammon Federation just named me ‘the new face of backgammon’,” Davenport told me. She bounced around the room, hugging guests.

Davenport previously worked in tech sales, and moved to New York from California in 2023. She learnt the game from her friend’s Lebanese father when she was young. The club is now her full-time job, and she has aspirations of world gammon domination. Her catchphrase is “Hell yeah”. Her club is open to anyone willing to pay a $10 cover, alongside a drink minimum and a promotional photographic release. My sparkling water, with tax and tip, was $11.59.

Despite the hefty bar bills and marketing savvy, money play isn’t a feature of the NYC Club. Working on your game isn’t really the central point, either. Networking is. “You can get to know people in an easy, kind of casual way,” Davenport said. Its promotional materials read: “Come for backgammon. Leave with new friends.”

I did agree to a quick money game in a back room with Sam Rappaport, a club regular who works in private credit. Rappaport noted the difficulty of making friends as an adult, and appreciated the lubrication that the dice provide. Anyway, $5 a point. A little while later, he forked over my $10.

Rappaport, like Woolley, was stupefied by chess’s canonical supremacy. “Backgammon is the better game in every way,” he told me. “It’s more like real life, especially to investor types — there’s risk and reward, there’s equity.”

The park

The next day I headed uptown to Union Square Park, at 14th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. A series of games players sat at flimsy tables at the base of a broad bank of stairs. Garbage littered their busy stage, as did a motley group of New Yorkers, sprawled on the steps in the sun. The players beckoned, like carnival barkers, to passers-by. This is New York backgammon at its most democratic and unvarnished; games in the park are games at their purest.

It was a crisp spring afternoon, and a man called Poe sat comfortably in a hooded sweatshirt and a straw hat. He commanded a table double-barrelled with equipment — chess on the right and backgammon on the left, the full hustler’s repertoire. Michael Jackson blared from a boom box propped on a chair. Anyone with a bit of gambler in them could sit down for a game.

“If people think they can make a lot of money playing backgammon, they got the wrong approach,” he told me as I sat down. “Try finance.”

Poe and I discussed terms. We agreed to stakes of $10 a point, plus a $5 “table fee”, the premium I would pay for the privilege of sitting at his folding table. Poe played a swift and solid game. We exchanged a few hits, and he offered an early doubling cube. 

Hanging over backgammon’s race-battle is this, the doubling cube, the best and trickiest part of the game. The cube is a six-sided die. Each side increases the jeopardy of the game. At any point before rolling, a player can turn this cube, which offers to double the stakes. The other player can accept the cube and the game goes on, or decline it and resign. The cube forces you to reckon honestly with the game — and with yourself.

I accepted the offer. “That was a crazy cube,” Poe admitted. We rolled on.

Poe learnt the game watching the greats decades ago — legendary erstwhile chess masters who migrated to backgammon for action and cash. But Poe has a complicated relationship with playing games for money, and occasionally seemed apologetic for all the talk of dollar figures.

On the one hand, the stakes and fee are useful as practical crowd-control around his small table: you can clear out cheapskate interlopers. “There are so many people in this goddamn city, you gotta keep the traffic down.”

On the other, they keep people playing in the park: “It’s designed for the culture. We’re not here to try to make a lot of money, but the culture’s gotta be supported.”

People think it’s easy. It’s hard controlling the game. It may look like you’re in control — next thing you know, you’re losing’

Throughout our game Poe was a poet of the dice, capturing what makes this so-called cruellest game thrilling and maddening. “People think it’s easy,” he said. “It’s hard controlling the game. It may look like you’re in control, and next thing you know, you’re losing.” It certainly had looked like I was in control. But a couple of well-timed rolls and eventually Poe constructed a perfect blockade, six-checkers wide — called a prime — over which it was impossible for me to jump. He cruised the rest of his checkers home without issue.

I counted out Poe’s cash and handed it over. “If I don’t win, I don’t eat, nor do I sleep,” he said. Another man was waiting for my seat, so I rose to say goodbye.

The money game

The folding-table loss stung only briefly, and I wanted to raise the stakes. Unfortunately the serious-money backgammon in New York is often played out of sight — in uptown apartments, Midtown offices or gilded clubhouses. Members of the latter claim to have invented the doubling cube, and recently celebrated its centennial. 

Stephen Holt is vice-chair of the backgammon committee at the Union Club, one such gilded clubhouse. He told me the game is flourishing there, and for good reason: “There is that whimsical thing where the underdog can suddenly come back and win, and it brings a personality to the game.” The Union Club tours the elite clubs of the north-east in matching neckties, with bespoke boards in tow.

But occasionally — as on a recent, scorching Thursday — a big-money game escapes outdoors. In this case, I found them in a triangle of concrete near Madison Square Park, lodged between 23rd Street, Fifth Avenue and Broadway. This humble setting, home to various chairs and umbrellas, hosts a centre of New York street-game playing, born of a lengthy history and rich ecosystem.

Abe “The Snake” Mosseri sat in the sun, shouting out moves and handing out bottled waters. Mosseri is a professional gambler, expert gammon and gin player, and twice-bracelet winner at the World Series of Poker. He learnt the game decades ago in Washington Square Park as a student at NYU, where he met storied hustlers with names like Russian Paul and Falafel (who was one of the greatest gammon players of all time; he earned his nickname from the cheap meal he favoured in his early hustling days). Now, the games come to Mosseri.

“In New York, when they wanna play, everybody calls me,” Mosseri said. (I am friends with an acquaintance of a friend of Mosseri’s, and eventually got hold of his phone number — and, true to his word, an invitation.)

This day’s game was $100 a point; an average afternoon in the park might tally to a few thousand dollars. Like the stakes of their games, the chouette crowd quickly doubled — from two to four to eight. It continued to swell throughout the afternoon. This has been a popular patch of concrete lately. One attributed the game’s growth to the economy — $100 ain’t what it used to be.

The men sweating here shared a few characteristics: a love of backgammon, a fondness for black athletic shorts and a scepticism of journalists. Few would share their last names, or how they had money and time to be playing backgammon for thousands of dollars on a Thursday afternoon. They conducted business, meanwhile. A mobile notary public delivered a contract for one player to sign at the board; another player recognised the mobile notary public.

They kept score in a thick, battered notebook. Small fortunes have surely been ledgered through its pages.

Oliver Roeder is the FT’s senior data journalist in the US

What do you love about backgammon? Where do you play? Tell us in the comments below

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