Dr. Cihangir Çetinel won the World Backgammon Champion title at his 40th year of backgammon career. An authentic version of backgammon, called tavla, has been played for many centuries as a social game in Turkey. In 1950s, this game was empowered with doubling cube to reduce luck factor in the short run (even without the doubling cube, there is no luck factor in the long run, only human cognitive skills determine the results). WBF Turkey spreaded this modern version of the game last 15 years. 8 years later came ISTAVDER to make the quality of tournament execution higher and promoted the use of analysis software. Last five years, TAVLAVEHAYAT has been uniquely offering mostly Turkish and some English training material freely to the backgammon community. With all these combined efforts, Turkish backgammon community reached the first World Backgammon Champion title. We as tavlavehayat would like to congratulate Dr. Cihangir Çetinel and wish him continuing success.
We are publishing the XG analysis of the final match here. We will publish the commentary soon in Turkish as a gift to our Turkish backgammon community.
Sabri Büyüksoy
