1 October 2026

The Jekyll-and-Hyde of Backgammon cheats

Man is not truly one, but truly two.

There’s an uncomfortable pattern that we have noticed at 5POINT. Among the confirmed cheating cases that we’ve studied carefully, backgammon organisers and tournament directors are significantly overrepresented. There is a small but striking share of the players involved who also hold significant administrational roles in the backgammon community - including senior positions in national organisations. Of course we are bound by confidentiality and cannot mention any names or identifying features.

At first we were puzzled. Why would individuals who go out of their way to help the Backgammon community also bend the rules to their advantage? Here’s our hypothesis for why this might be the case.

Firstly, most of the cases we’ve confirmed involve tournaments with only a nominal cash reward. Financial gain, therefore, clearly isn’t the driver.

Secondly, the number of players and the size of tournaments are relatively small compared to games like poker and chess. Organising and administering tournaments is usually hard, thankless work. Yet plenty of people worldwide are only too happy to take it on - why do they do this? What motivates them? There must be a range of reasons of course, even within individuals, but for some we believe they seek and enjoy the status of being a leader within the community. And this is only natural as they provide a real good to the community and so the community should revere them.

But stronger Performance Ratings can translate into status too: reputation, the respect of elite players, and an elevated social standing.

It is this desire for status which might be what tempts some players into cheating as well as being organisers. Within these players, there are polar twins continuously struggling. Dr Jekyll is the last to leave the club night, helping new players, packing up the boards and entering results into the rating system late into the evening - while Mr Hyde is using their favourite engine to avoid blunders and steal games away from their online opponent.

Perhaps we’ve been naive and this shouldn’t surprise us. All social animals have social hierarchies, chimpanzees, wolves do, people aren’t different. If we suppose that raw skill would be the natural order within backgammon, that order can be altered through social popularity, good sportsmanship, administration or even by cheating. We see this demonstrated in the Giants of Backgammon list, which incorporates both skill and standing within the community.

We see the same in chess, bridge, and other games where administrators have been found cheating. Outside games too for example, Reddit moderators who overclaim contribution to stay in a high-status circle point the same way. It may just be a facet of human personality that shows up, in a small number of people, across many domains.

So what does that mean for integrity in backgammon? We believe every relevant signal should feed into keeping the game fair - to help us all act as honorable stewards of the game so that it might be enjoyed by new players for thousands of years to come. The job for 5POINT is to support the people who organise the games, give them the tools and knowledge to ensure the chief of sinners out there - are the chief of sufferers also.