Avoiding the Disorder of Rival World Championships of Backgammon
Read here.
An intermezzo in my multipart article: An Orderly World Championships of Backgammon
Last week, the UKBGF blog published my article ‘Part 1: My Yearly Pilgrimage to the Mecca of our game’. There I laid out the logic for upholding our traditions as a community by keeping the World Championships of Backgammon in Monaco and coalescing around a consistent format with an ever-increasing prize pool, so as to gain sponsors, media coverage, new players, and prestige. I also warned of the dangers of changing the diet of the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Little did I know how timely my warning would be. On Sunday August 23, 2025, the World Backgammon Federation (WBGF) dropped a bombshell announcing that they would create a rival ‘World Championship’ which would vie for legitimacy alongside the 56-year old BGWC. The WBGF were careful not to claim to be seeking to replace the BGWC, but their choice of words has created pure Disorder.
This announcement has sparked a flurry of social media posts mostly by those who oppose this development. Furthermore, the WBGF has taken the regrettable step of preventing the community from commenting on its own Facebook page by blocking comments to its post. To untangle this complex situation, I have spoken to WBGF Board members while researching this article and have learned that WBGF have been preparing this decision in secret for many months and that they avoided communication/coordination with the BGWC prior to the announcement. Rather than rehashing what others have said or criticizing the WBGF directly, I would like to coherently make the case for why this is the wrong direction for us as a community, rather than getting into the personality or the institutional politics.
I like the idea of having a World Federation that governs backgammon and I applaud the WBGF for its efforts to standardise the game, create a tour of events, and raise the profile of its global team event. I even like the idea of the WBGF creating its own premier tournament. If I allow myself to play devil’s advocate, its recent decision will give more people with various skill levels, bank accounts, and passports, the chance to compete to be ‘World Champion’. It will even give more players the thrill of playing in life changing backgammon matches. This is a potential positive. But at what cost?
The reality is that glory and true victory are actually zero sum. Unless you are in elementary school, there shouldn’t be participation trophies. You can’t have three NFL teams win the Super Bowl per year. You can’t have two football teams win the Premier League or Champions League per year. Like with Libya having two rival governments, neither of which has real sovereignty (as it has done since 2014), having two world champions of Backgammon per year is closer to having no real world champion at all.
It is great that we have an active Global Backgammon Federation trying to make new events. We should applaud this. But why not just differentiate the new from the old, rather than bringing them into direct conflict, or at the very least confusion in the popular imagination? Why did WBGF make its move without full consultation with BGWC and the whole community? We are all on Facebook, why not conduct polls on social media and solicit input before making such an announcement? Why not warn in advance to avoid the shock?
BG is growing. There is enough space for all of us and I welcome a new prestigious event run by WBGF that would travel to different cities each year. It can be styled as almost anything it wants, but it cannot morally be the ‘World Championship of Backgammon’. That event already exists, is rooted in key IP online, and has its own traditions and lineage. This is akin to someone naming their podcast or book ‘The Global Enduring Disorder’ without giving me credit for it. We live in an online world where IP is everything. Morally, you can’t just appropriate someone else’s IP in the global consciousness and create a confusion of search terms. It just isn’t cricket to name your product the same thing as someone else’s established product.
So the WBGF’s event must NOT use the exact same verbiage as the BGWC. I want everyone who is seeking to grow backgammon to succeed. So let’s just all take a moment for some deep breathes and then start to deconflict. Let’s seek out win-win compromises. Let’s respect long-established IP. So here is the advice directly from my Lincoln’s Inn Fields IP Lawyer to the WBGF: ‘whatever you choose to do, just avoid doing something that sounds like mimicking someone else’s IP, especially if it is likely to ruffle feathers publically, and look disrespectful to the established IP holder’. The reason the Federations were created was to bring respectability to the game.
The WBGF can still have their event and save face by making a new announcement stating their ‘keen attention to community feedback’ and announcing a slight change in the name of their event to something like: The World Cup, The World Backgammon Open, The Global Players’ Championship, the International Individual Championship, or the Federation Cup,. Thanks to James Vogl and David Frier for their excellent naming suggestions on Facebook. If WBGF insist on pressing ahead on their stated course, at least they can brand it ‘the World Backgammon Federation Championships’ rather than the currently proposed ‘WBGF World Championships’ which is what creates the problem: the two words ‘World’ and ‘Championship’ should not be sequential in the title of their proposed event.
So WBGF, I call upon you to announce the name change and make clear that the WBGF will not style the winner of their newly proposed event in their press releases and trophies as the ‘WORLD CHAMPION’ and we can all go back to being a happy, yet moderately dysfunctional backgammon family. If WBGF fails to take this step and press ahead calling their tournament the World Championships, it risks diluting the branding and pedigree of what Mochy, Akiko, Jorgen Granstedt, Frank Frigo, Bill Robertie, Johan Moazed, Lars Trabolt, and the other titans of our sport have achieved.
The name change I am proposing will benefit the WBGF in achieving their stated objective of inclusivity, as at present the current branding and mission they are proposing are misaligned. Their desire for inclusivity, while laudable, inherently diminished the prospective event’s prestige below that necessary for a genuine ‘World Championship’. Those two quantities are inherently inversely correlated. For Backgammon to be a serious global mind sport akin to Chess, as well as a world class gambling game akin to Poker, there must be a large enough prize pool at tournaments for players to hope to defray their travel expenses and for professionals to stand a chance of making a living by winning in tournament play. Furthermore, the monetary and prestige implications of winning ‘the World Championships’ must be significant enough to impact the winner’s life and prove whether she or he can play at their best under real pressure when something profoundly meaningful is really on the line.
Playing under the unique pressure caused by life changing prestige and money requires a different skill than just playing a large competitive backgammon tournament. Playing a low PR to win a large tournament is very laudable. We already have Istavder and Cyprus for that.
No one grows up in this game dreaming of being ‘Champion of the Merit Open’. They dream of being ‘World Champion’. BGWC is getting 100k+ views on the World Championship Final videos on YouTube. That is because it is the undisputed heavyweight championship of the backgammon world. Do you think that having another match calling itself the ‘finals of the World Championships of Backgammon’ will make our community look good to casual players chatting about it at their pub tournament in Bristol or on Wall Street or at a Shisha café in Egypt? I think not. It makes us look amateurish. Let’s not have a war over the List of World Backgammon Champions Wikipedia page, please. I can’t think of anything more calculated to make our community look foolish and unserious than that.
Backgammon is experiencing a renaissance. Not at the level of the 1970s, but the game is growing alongside chess in the post-pandemic, post-Queen’s Gambit era. The game has done great work to evict cheaters and improve its reputation with the creation of federations and a unified set of rules. This recent careless new step by the WBGF threatens to jeopardize all this progress. God forbid we should be plunged into Disorder and experience what Boxing has suffered in the last decade– a fade into irrelevance as competing world bodies confused the public, allowing a new sport in its genre – Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) – to eclipse its prominence.
It is the glamour, prestige, and lineage of the real BGWC event that attracts people to it. It is that lineage and continuity which makes our game prestigious and respectable. If WBGF proceed with the recent poorly articulated plan, it will be a disaster for our community and will create confusion in casual players’ minds and the impression that we are not a serious community. It will create a system of a Pope in Rome and anti-Pope in Avignon. History tells us this hurt the papacy as an institution and the reputation of the Catholic Church. It took centuries to heal.
If this potential threat to continuity and tradition goes ahead, what is to prevent yet other bodies from announcing their own ‘World Championships of Backgammon’? Nothing. Soon the new upstart International Backgammon Federation (IBF) – backed by money and logistical support from the Russian Sports Ministry – will draw encouragement and announce its own ‘IBF International Championship of Backgammon’ as being hosted next year in Yerevan. As soon as a new ‘World Championship’ is announced it will still be appropriate for players who oppose the decision to participate.
I wish to state that if WBGF go ahead with their announced desire to host a rival ‘World Championship’, I will feel compelled to play in both world championships and to cover them both as a journalist/commentator. But I don’t want to be forced to be in that position. Please WBGF, just listen to reason, call it the World Cup, Global Player’s Championships, or WBGF Championships. I’ll still attend, but I’ll be in a better mood and I’ll make you nicer publicity on my podcast and substack. Isn’t that better for everyone?
We are at a pivotal moment for the global backgammon community. There are win-win compromises ahead of us and there are paths of vitriol, division, and disorder. We must now respond to this challenge and demand democracy, tradition, and continuity. Let’s be a community that compromises and respects each other. Let’s not dilute our traditions and continuities, let’s not condone IP encroachment, or we will risk going the way of boxing or checkers.