Backgammon is the ultimate head-to-head board game—an action-packed race to the finish with an addictive mix of luck and skill. It's easy to pick up the basics, but this is a game that continually surprises—there's always something new to learn, and the Internet has opened up a whole other world of gaming opportunities. In Backgammon for Blood, Chris Bray, top-ranked backgammon player, reveals the tips and tricks needed to help you play the game like a pro, whether you want to make serious money in online tournaments or just play for fun at a board with friends. While backgammon can be lost or won on the throw of the dice, tactical moves and game plans can help you adapt your play to deal with whatever comes your way. With chapters on opening rolls, mid-game strategies, and races and endings, his step-by-step suggestions, sample game illustrations, and easy-to-follow text have everything you need to come to grips with the game. The different ways to play backgammon—from tournaments and chouettes to computer and online play—are all covered, as are the secrets of making the doubling cube work in your favor. Insightful and informative, Backgammon for Blood: A Guide for Those Who Like to Play but Love to Win is the ideal introduction to this dynamic and challenging game.

Backgammon is the ultimate board game - an action-packed race to the finish with an addictive mix of luck and skill. It is easy to pick up the basics, but this is a game that continually surprises - there's always something new to learn, and the Internet has opened up a whole new world of gaming opportunities. In Backgammon to Win Chris Bray, backgammon columnist for The Independent, reveals tips and tricks needed to help you play the game like a professional, whether you want to make serious money in online tournaments or just play for fun with friends. The 2018 edition has new diagrams, a new font and has corrected some errors in the previous two versions. A couple of chapters have been updated to reflect the changes in the game since the last edition in 2012.

Illuminates the fascinating, intertwined histories of games and the Early Modern theater

table { }.font5 { color: black; font-size: 8pt; font-weight: 700; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif; }.font6 { color: black; font-size: 8pt; font-weight: 700; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif; }td { padding: 0px; color: windowtext; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; vertical-align: bottom; border: medium none; white-space: nowrap; }.xl66 { font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }.xl67 { font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; vertical-align: middle; } The world's best backgammon player (and two-time champion) provides easy-to-understand advice on the basics of playing and winning at backgammon. Ten fast-reading chapters show the basics of setting up a board, how to move, the opening strategies and replies, middle and end game tactics, basic probabilities, plus back game and doubling strategy. Two sample games are included with move-by-move insights so players learn the winning concepts of play at all stages of the game. A great first book for beginning and somewhat experienced players.

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.

In the tradition of The Prize, a contemporary look at the history, passion, and politics of oil and gas resources, and the struggle to control them. Using the concept of the “Great Game” that Rudyard Kipling immortalized in his novel Kim, Kleveman argues that there is now a new Great Game in the region, a modern variant of the nineteenth-century clash of imperial ambitions of Great Britain and Tsarist Russia. Traveling thousands of miles, from Turkmenistan (where statues of the country’s leader are made of gold and line the thoroughfares) to the Afghan Hindu Kush, Kleveman met with the principal Great Game actors between Kabul and Moscow: oil barons, generals, diplomats, and warlords. Based on extensive research and travel in the Caucasus, the Caspian, and Central Asia, The New Great Game is a thrilling travel narrative through one of the world’s last unexplored frontiers, and a savvy and incisive analysis of the power struggle for the world’s remaining energy resources. “[Kleveman] can take credit for a book that is essential for those seeking as many views as possible on this complicated moment in history.” —The Seattle Times