Learn backgammon to an intermediate club player in six months
Six months of daily play and analysis — about 30 minutes a day — gets a beginner past the casual-player wall and into the territory where you understand why each move is right or wrong. Roughly 90 hours total. You will lose to experts. You will beat your friends.
6 months · ~90 hours · sub-10 PR (performance rating) on XG analysis
1.Bill Robertie — Backgammon for Winners
Robertie is a two-time world champion and the rare expert who writes for beginners without condescension. Backgammon for Winners covers opening rolls, basic checker play, the cube, and two annotated games — enough that by the end you know what most positions are about. Short, ninety pages, no padding. Read it twice before you read anything else.
~$10 in paperback
Backgammon for Winners →2.eXtreme Gammon — record and analyze every match
XG is the strongest backgammon engine on the planet and the only piece of software that matters for improvement. Play matches against the bot, then run the analysis — XG flags every blunder you made and shows you the better play with rollouts. After two months your performance rating drops from 20+ to single digits, which is the entire game. Windows-only; runs fine in a Mac VM.
$59.95 one-time
eXtreme Gammon →3.BGonline.org forums
The worldwide community of serious backgammon players posts here. Read the Position of the Day threads — strong players debate a single move and back it with rollouts. Lurk for a month before posting; ask questions about positions you genuinely don't understand. The signal-to-noise ratio is the best in any game forum on the internet.
Free
BGonline.org →If this doesn't fit you
If you don't want to install software or pay for XG, the free engine GnuBG is good enough for the first six months. It analyzes matches, plays at world-class strength, and runs on every operating system. It is uglier and slower than XG and the workflow is clunkier — but it costs nothing, and beginners do not need the extra precision.
Why this path
Backgammon is the only classic game where bot analysis is decisively better than any human teacher. Every match you play, XG can tell you exactly which moves were wrong and by how many equity points. This is a luxury chess and Go don't quite have at the same depth. Robertie gives you the framework to understand what XG is showing you, BGonline gives you the human community to argue with. Most self-taught players skip the analysis and stall at intermediate forever. Don't skip the analysis.