Every year in September our Club organises an international backgammon tournament, which attracts players from all over the world due to the high level of participants, but also to the beautiful location and the excellent cuisine, that has won the hearts of Italians and foreigners alike.
A very successful event is the private broadcasting of the final game in one of our rooms, commented by top-level Italian experts.
As many as three world vice-champions, several British, French and Japanese giants (that is, the players voted as the world’s thirty strongest players) as well as the 2016 Mind Games World Champion have taken part in our tournaments.
The tournament is also attended by all the players who are interested in the Italian Backgammon championship, of which Rome is one of the most prestigious phases.
Backgammon is an ancient game: traces of it have been found in Mesopotamia, dating back to no less than 5000 years before Christ; then, in the centuries that followed, it brought together peoples across the Mediterranean.
Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans played it regularly, calling it by different names and following different rules, but always giving this game an additional transcendent meaning as a metaphor of human life, which is related to skill as well as to fate.
It thrived through the Middle Ages, and finally reached modern times with major adjustments coming especially from the English-speaking world, that have made it more complex: its random and gambling characteristics have remained, however, which makes it terribly engaging.
In the past thirty years, the game has been revolutionised from the technical and strategic points of view, also thanks to the introduction of software data analysis.
