title: Boban Marjanović

text: Marjanović made an appearance in the Netflix film "Hustle", produced by LeBron James and Adam Sandler.


title: Master's degree

text: A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice. A master's degree normally requires previous study at the bachelor's level, either as a separate degree or as part of an integrated course. Within the area studied, master's graduates are expected to possess advanced knowledge of a specialized body of theoretical and applied topics; high order skills in analysis, critical evaluation, or professional application; and the ability to solve complex problems and think rigorously and independently.


title: Master's degree

text: The master's degree dates back to the origin of European universities, with a Papal bull of 1233 decreeing that anyone admitted to the mastership in the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach freely in any other university. The original meaning of the master's degree was thus that someone who had been admitted to the rank (degree) of master (i.e. teacher) in one university should be admitted to the same rank in other universities. This gradually became formalised as the (licence to teach). Originally, masters and doctors were not distinguished, but by the 15th century it had become customary in the English universities to refer to the teachers in the lower faculties (arts and grammar) as masters and those in the higher faculties as doctors. Initially, the Bachelor of Arts (BA) was awarded for the study of the trivium and the Master of Arts (MA) for the study of the quadrivium.


title: Master's degree

text: From the late Middle Ages until the 19th century, the pattern of degrees was therefore to have a bachelor's and master's degree in the lower faculties and to have bachelor's and doctorates in the higher faculties. In the United States, the first master's degrees (, or Master of Arts) were awarded at Harvard University soon after its foundation. In Scotland, the pre-Reformation universities (St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen) developed so that the Scottish MA became their first degree, while in Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin, the MA was awarded to BA graduates of a certain standing without further examination from the late 17th century, its main purpose being to confer full membership of the university. At Harvard the 1700 regulations required that candidates for the master's degree had to pass a public examination, but by 1835 this was awarded Oxbridge-style three years after the BA.


title: Master's degree

text: The 19th century saw a great expansion in the variety of master's degrees offered. At the start of the century, the only master's degree was the MA, and this was normally awarded without any further study or examination. The Master in Surgery degree was introduced by the University of Glasgow in 1815. By 1861 this had been adopted throughout Scotland as well as by Cambridge and Durham in England and the University of Dublin in Ireland. When the Philadelphia College of Surgeons was established in 1870, it too conferred the Master of Surgery, "the same as that in Europe".


title: Master's degree

text: In Scotland, Edinburgh maintained separate BA and MA degrees until the mid-19th century, although there were major doubts as to the quality of the Scottish degrees of this period. In 1832 Lord Brougham, the Lord Chancellor and an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh, told the House of Lords that "In England the Universities conferred degrees after a considerable period of residence, after much labour performed, and if they were not in all respects so rigorous as the statutes of the Universities required, nevertheless it could not be said, that Masters of Arts were created at Oxford and Cambridge as they were in Scotland, without any residence, or without some kind of examination. In Scotland, all the statutes of the Universities which enforced conditions on the grant of degrees were a dead letter."


title: Master's degree

text: It was not until 1837 that separate examinations were reintroduced for the MA in England, at the newly established Durham University (even though, as in the ancient English universities, this was to confer full membership), to be followed in 1840 by the similarly new University of London, which was only empowered by its charter to grant degrees by examination. However, by the middle of the century the MA as an examined second degree was again under threat, with Durham moving to awarding it automatically to those who gained honours in the BA in 1857, along the lines of the Oxbridge MA, and Edinburgh following the other Scottish universities in awarding the MA as its first degree, in place of the BA, from 1858. At the same time, new universities were being established around the then British Empire along the lines of London, including examinations for the MA: the University of Sydney in Australia and the Queen's University of Ireland in 1850, and the Universities of Bombay (now the University of Mumbai), Madras and Calcutta in India in 1857.


title: Master's degree

text: In the US, the revival of master's degrees as an examined qualification began in 1856 at the University of North Carolina, followed by the University of Michigan in 1859, although the idea of a master's degree as an earned second degree was not well established until the 1870s, alongside the PhD as the terminal degree. Sometimes it was possible to earn an MA either by examination or by seniority in the same institution; for example, in Michigan the "in course" MA was introduced in 1848 and was last awarded in 1882, while the "on examination" MA was introduced in 1859.


title: Master's degree

text: Probably the most important master's degree introduced in the 19th century was the Master of Science (MS in the US, MSc in the UK). At the University of Michigan this was introduced in two forms in 1858: "in course", first awarded in 1859, and "on examination", first awarded in 1862. The "in course" MS was last awarded in 1876. In Britain, however, the degree took a while longer to arrive. When London introduced its Faculty of Sciences in 1858, the University was granted a new charter giving it the power "to confer the several Degrees of Bachelor, Master, and Doctor, in Arts, Laws, Science, Medicine, Music", but the degrees it awarded in science were the Bachelor of Science and the Doctor of Science. The same two degrees, again omitting the master's, were awarded at Edinburgh, despite the MA being the standard undergraduate degree for Arts in Scotland. In 1862, a Royal Commission suggested that Durham should award master's degrees in theology and science (with the suggested abbreviations MT and MS, contrary to later British practice of using MTh or MTheol and MSc for these degrees), but its recommendations were not enacted. In 1877, Oxford introduced the Master of Natural Science, along with the Bachelor of Natural Science, to stand alongside the MA and BA degrees and be awarded to students who took their degrees in the honours school of natural sciences. In 1879 a statute to actually establish the faculty of Natural Sciences at Oxford was promulgated, but in 1880 a proposal to rename the degree as a Master of Science was rejected along with a proposal to grant Masters of Natural Sciences a Master of Arts degree, in order to make them full members of the University. This scheme would appear to have then been quietly dropped, with Oxford going on to award BAs and MAs in science.


title: Master's degree

text: The Master of Science (MSc) degree was finally introduced in Britain in 1878 at Durham, followed by the new Victoria University in 1881. At the Victoria University both the MA and MSc followed the lead of Durham's MA in requiring a further examination for those with an ordinary bachelor's degree but not for those with honours.


title: Master's degree

text: At the start of the 20th century, there were, therefore, four different sorts of master's degree in the UK: the Scottish MA, granted as a first degree; the Master of Arts (Oxbridge and Dublin), granted to all BA graduates a certain period after their first degree without further study; master's degrees that could be gained either by further study or by gaining an honours degree (which, at the time in the UK involved further study beyond the ordinary degree, as it still does in Scotland and some Commonwealth countries); and master's degrees that could only be obtained by further study (including all London master's degrees). In 1903, the "London Daily News" criticised the practice of Oxford and Cambridge, calling their MAs "the most stupendous of academic frauds" and "bogus degrees". Ensuing correspondence pointed out that "A Scotch M.A., at the most, is only the equivalent of an English B.A." and called for common standards for degrees, while defenders of the ancient universities said that "the Cambridge M.A. does not pretend to be a reward of learning" and that "it is rather absurd to describe one of their degrees as a bogus one because other modern Universities grant the same degree for different reasons".


title: Master's degree

text: In 1900, Dartmouth College introduced the Master of Commercial Science (MCS), first awarded in 1902. This was the first master's degree in business, the forerunner of the modern MBA. The idea quickly crossed the Atlantic, with Manchester establishing a Faculty of Commerce, awarding Bachelor and Master of Commerce degrees, in 1903. Over the first half of the century the automatic master's degrees for honours graduates vanished as honours degrees became the standard undergraduate qualification in the UK. In the 1960s, new Scottish universities (except for Dundee, which inherited the undergraduate MA from St Andrews) reintroduced the BA as their undergraduate degree in Arts, restoring the MA to its position as a postgraduate qualification. Oxford and Cambridge retained their MAs, but renamed many of their postgraduate bachelor's degrees in the higher faculties as master's degrees, e.g. the Cambridge LLB became the LLM in 1982, and the Oxford BLitt, BPhil (except in philosophy) and BSc became the MLitt, MPhil and MSc.


title: Master's degree

text: In 1983, the Engineering Council issued a "'Statement on enhanced and extended undergraduate engineering degree courses", proposing the establishment of a four-year first degree (Master of Engineering). These were up and running by the mid 1980s and were followed in the early 1990s by the MPhys for physicists and since then integrated master's degrees in other sciences such as MChem, MMath, and MGeol, and in some institutions general or specific MSci (Master in Science) and MArts (Master in Arts) degrees. This development was noted by the Dearing Report into UK Higher Education in 1997, which called for the establishment of a national framework of qualifications and identified five different routes to master's degrees:


title: Master's degree

text: This led to the establishment of the Quality Assurance Agency, which was charged with drawing up the framework.


title: Master's degree

text: In 2000 renewed pressure was put on Oxbridge MAs in the UK Parliament, with Labour MP Jackie Lawrence introducing an early day motion calling for them to be scrapped and telling the "Times Higher Education" it was a "discriminatory practice" and that it "devalues and undermines the efforts of students at other universities". The following month the Quality Assurance Agency announced the results of a survey of 150 major employers showing nearly two thirds mistakenly thought the Cambridge MA was a postgraduate qualification and just over half made the same error regarding the Edinburgh MA, with QAA chief executive John Randall calling the Oxbridge MA "misleading and anachronistic".


title: Master's degree

text: The QAA released the first "framework for higher education qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland" in January 2001. This specified learning outcomes for M-level (master's) degrees and advised that the title "Master" should only be used for qualifications that met those learning outcomes in full. It addressed many of the Dearing Report's concerns, specifying that shorter courses at H-level (honours), e.g. conversion courses, should be styled Graduate Diploma or Graduate Certificate rather than as master's degrees, but confirmed that the extended undergraduate degrees were master's degrees, saying that "Some Masters degrees in science and engineering are awarded after extended undergraduate programmes that last, typically, a year longer than Honours degree programmes". It also addressed the Oxbridge MA issue, noting that "the MAs granted by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge are not academic qualifications". The first "framework for qualifications of Higher Education Institutes in Scotland", also published in January 2001, used the same qualifications descriptors, adding in credit values that specified that a stand-alone master should be 180 credits and a "Masters (following an integrated programme from undergraduate to Masters level study)" should be 600 credits with a minimum of 120 at M-level. It was specified that the title "Master" should only be used for qualifications that met the learning outcomes and credit definitions, although it was noted that "A small number of universities in Scotland have a long tradition of labelling certain first degrees as 'MA'. Reports of Agency reviews of such provision will relate to undergraduate benchmarks and will make it clear that the title reflects Scottish custom and practice, and that any positive judgement on standards should not be taken as implying that the outcomes of the programme were at postgraduate level."


title: Master's degree

text: The Bologna declaration in 1999 started the Bologna Process, leading to the creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This established a three-cycle bachelor's—master's—doctorate classification of degrees, leading to the adoption of master's degrees across the continent, often replacing older long-cycle qualifications such as the (arts), (sciences) and state registration (professional) awards in Germany. As the process continued, descriptors were introduced for all three levels in 2004, and ECTS credit guidelines were developed. This led to questions as to the status of the integrated master's degrees and one-year master's degrees in the UK. However, the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and the Framework for Qualifications of Higher Education Institutes in Scotland have both been aligned with the overarching framework for the EHEA with these being accepted as masters-level qualifications.


title: Master's degree

text: Master's degrees are commonly titled using the form 'Master of ...', where either a faculty (typically Arts or Science) or a field (Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Business Administration, etc.) is specified. The two most common titles of master's degrees are the Master of Arts (MA/M.A./A.M) and Master of Science (MSc/M.Sc./M.S./S.M.) degrees, which normally consist of a mixture of research and taught material.


title: Master's degree

text: The title of Master of Philosophy (MPhil) indicates (in the same manner as Doctor of Philosophy) an extended degree with a large research component. Other generically named master's programs include the Master of Studies (MSt)/Master of Advanced Study (MASt)/Master of Advanced Studies (M.A.S.), and Professional Master's (MProf). Integrated master's degrees and postgraduate master's degrees oriented towards professional practice are often more specifically named for their field of study ("tagged degrees"), including, for example, Master of Business Administration, Master of Divinity, Master of Engineering, Master of Physics, and Master of Public Health.


title: Master's degree

text: The form "Master in ..." is also sometimes used, particularly where a faculty title is used for an integrated master's degree in addition to its use in a traditional postgraduate master's degree, e.g. Master in Science (MSci) and Master in Arts (MArts). This form is also sometimes used with other integrated master's degrees and occasionally for postgraduate master's degrees (e.g. Master's in Accounting). Some universities use Latin degree names; because of the flexibility of syntax in Latin, the Master of Arts and Master of Science degrees may be known in these institutions as and or reversed from the English order to and . Examples of the reversed usage include Harvard University and the University of Chicago, leading to the abbreviations A.M. and S.M. for these degrees. The forms "Master of Science" and "Master in Science" are indistinguishable in Latin.


title: Master's degree

text: In the UK, full stops (periods) are not commonly used in degree abbreviations. In the US, The Gregg Reference Manual recommends placing periods in degrees (e.g. B.S., Ph.D.), while The Chicago Manual of Style recommends writing degrees without periods (e.g. BS, PhD).


title: Master's degree

text: Master of Science is generally abbreviated M.S. or MS in countries following United States usage and MSc or M.Sc. in countries following British usage, where MS would refer to the degree of Master of Surgery. In Australia, some extended master's degrees use the title "doctor": Juris doctor and Doctors of Medical Practice, Physiotherapy, Dentistry, Optometry and Veterinary Practice. Despite their titles these are still master's degree and may not be referred to as doctoral degrees, nor may graduates use the title "doctor".


title: Master's degree

text: The United States Department of Education classifies master's degrees as research or professional. Research master's degrees in the US (e.g., M.A./A.M. or M.S.) require the completion of taught courses and examinations in a major and one or more minor subjects, as well as (normally) a research thesis. Professional master's degrees may be structured like research master's (e.g., M.E./M.Eng.) or may concentrate on a specific discipline (e.g., M.B.A.) and often substitute a project for the thesis.


title: Master's degree

text: The Australian Qualifications Framework classifies master's degrees as research, coursework or extended. Research master's degrees typically take one to two years, and two-thirds of their content consists of research, research training and independent study. Coursework master's degrees typically also last one to two years, and consist mainly of structured learning with some independent research and project work or practice-related learning. Extended master's degrees typically take three to four years and contain significant practice-related learning that must be developed in collaboration with relevant professional, statutory or regulatory bodies.


title: Master's degree

text: In Ireland, master's degrees may be either Taught or Research. Taught master's degrees are normally one to two year courses, rated at 60 - 120 ECTS credits, while research master's degrees are normally two year courses, either rated at 120 ECTS credits or not credit rated.


title: Master's degree

text: There is a range of pathways to the degree with entry based on evidence of a capacity to undertake higher level studies in a proposed field. A dissertation may or may not be required depending on the program. In general, structure and duration of a program of study leading to a master's degree will differ by country and university.


title: Master's degree

text: Master's programs in the US and Canada are normally two years (full-time) in length. In some fields/programs, work on a doctorate begins immediately after the bachelor's degree, but a master's degree may be granted along the way as an intermediate qualification if the student petitions for it. Some universities offer evening options so that students can work during the day and earn a master's degree in the evenings.


title: Master's degree

text: In the UK, postgraduate master's degrees typically take one to two years full-time or two to four years part-time. Master's degrees may be classified as either "research" or "taught", with taught degrees (those where research makes up less than half of the volume of work) being further subdivided into "specialist or advanced study" or "professional or practice". Taught degrees (of both forms) typically take a full calendar year (180 UK credits, compared to 120 for an academic year), while research degrees are not typically credit rated but may take up to two years to complete. An MPhil normally takes two calendar years (360 credits). An "integrated master's degree" (which is always a taught degree) combines a bachelor's degree course with an additional year of study (120 credits) at master's level for a four (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) or five (Scotland) academic year total period.


title: Master's degree

text: In Australia, master's degrees vary from one year for a "research" or "coursework" master's following on from an Australian honours degree in a related field, with an extra six months if following on straight from an ordinary bachelor's degree and another extra six months if following on from a degree in a different field, to four years for an "extended" master's degree. At some Australian universities, the master's degree may take up to two years.


title: Master's degree

text: In the Overarching Framework of Qualifications for the European Higher Education Area defined as part of the Bologna process, a "second cycle" (i.e. master's degree) programme is typically 90–120 ECTS credits, with a minimum requirement of at least 60 ECTS credits at second-cycle level. The definition of ECTS credits is that "60 ECTS credits are allocated to the learning outcomes and associated workload of a full-time academic year or its equivalent", thus European master's degrees should last for between one calendar year and two academic years, with at least one academic year of study at master's level. The Framework for Higher Education Qualification (FHEQ) in England Wales and Northern Ireland level 7 qualifications and the Framework for Qualification of Higher Education Institutes in Scotland (FQHEIS) level 11 qualifications (postgraduate and integrated master's degrees, except for MAs from the ancient universities of Scotland and Oxbridge MAs) have been certified as meeting this requirement.


title: Master's degree

text: Irish master's degrees are one to two years (60–120 ECTS credits) for taught degrees and two years (not credit rated) for taught and research degrees. These have also been certified as compatible with the FQ-EHEA.


title: Master's degree

text: Admission to a master's degree normally requires successful completion of study at bachelor's degree level either (for postgraduate degrees) as a stand-alone degree or (for integrated degrees) as part of an integrated scheme of study. In countries where the bachelor's degree with honours is the standard undergraduate degree, this is often the normal entry qualification. In addition, students will normally have to write a personal statement and, in the arts and humanities, will often have to submit a portfolio of work.


title: Master's degree

text: In the UK, students will normally need to have a 2:1. Students may also have to provide evidence of their ability to successfully pursue a postgraduate degree to be accepted into a taught master's course, and possibly higher for a research master's. Graduate schools in the US similarly require strong undergraduate performance, and may require students to take one or more standardised tests, such as the GRE, GMAT or LSAT.


title: Master's degree

text: In some European countries, a "magister" is a first degree and may be considered equivalent to a modern (standardized) master's degree ("e.g.", the German, Austrian and Polish university "Diplom/Magister", or the similar five-year Diploma awarded in several subjects in Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, and other universities and polytechnics).


title: Master's degree

text: Under the Bologna Process, countries in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) are moving to a three-cycle (bachelor's - master's - doctorate) system of degrees. Two-thirds of EHEA countries have standardised on 120 ECTS credits for their second-cycle (master's) degrees, but 90 ECTS credits is the main form in Cyprus, Ireland and Scotland and 60-75 credits in Montenegro, Serbia and Spain. The combined length of the first and second cycle varies from "3 + 1" years (240


title: Master's degree

text: ECTS credits), through "3 + 2" or "4 + 1" years (300 ECTS credits), to "4 + 2" years (360 ECTS credits). As of 2015, 31 EHEA countries have integrated programmes that combine the first and second cycle and lead to a second-cycle qualification (e.g. the UK integrated master's degree), particularly in STEM subjects and subjects allied to medicine. These typically have a duration of 300 – 360 ECTS credits (five to six years), with the integrated master's degrees in England, Wales and Northern Ireland being the shortest at 240 ECTS credits (four years).


title: Master's degree

text: After acquiring a Bachelor's or Licenciate Degree, students are qualified to continue their academic career through Master's Degree ("mestrado", in Portuguese, a.k.a. "stricto sensu" post-graduation) or Specialization Degree ("especialização", in Portuguese, a.k.a. "lato sensu" post-graduation) programs. At the Master's program there are 2–3 years of graduate-level studies. Usually focused on academic research, the Master's Degree requires, on any specific knowledge area, the development of a thesis to be presented and defended before a board of professors after the period of research. Conversely, the Specialization Degree, also comprehends a 1–2 years studies, but does not require a new thesis to be proposed and defended, being usually attended by professionals looking for complementary training on a specific area of their knowledge.


title: Master's degree

text: In addition, many Brazilian universities offer an MBA program. However, those are not the equivalent to a United States MBA degree, as it does not formally certify the student with a Master's degree ("stricto sensu") but with a Specialization Degree ("lato sensu") instead. A regular post-graduation course has to comply with a minimum of 360 class-hours, while a M.B.A. degree has to comply with a minimum of 400 class-hours. Master's degree ("stricto sensu") does not require a set minimum of class-hours, but it's practically impossible to finish it in less than 18 months due to the workload and research required; an average time for the degree is 2.5 years. Specialization ("lato sensu") and M.B.A. degrees can be also offered as distance education courses, while the master's degree ("stricto-sensu") requires physical attendance. In Brazil, the degree often serves as additional qualification for those seeking to differentiate themselves in the job market, or for those who want to pursue a Ph.D. It corresponds to the European (Bologna Process) 2nd Cycle or the North American master's.


title: Master's degree

text: For part-time study, two or three years of study are normally required to achieve a postgraduate degree.


title: Master's degree

text: In the Indian system, a master's degree is a postgraduate degree following a Bachelor's degree and preceding a Doctorate, usually requiring two years to complete. The available degrees include but are not limited to the following:


title: Master's degree

text: In the Indonesian higher education system, a master's degree () is a postgraduate degree following a Bachelor's degree, preceding a Doctorate and requiring a maximum of four years to complete. Master's degree students are required to submit their thesis () for examination by two or three examiners. The available degrees include but are not limited to the following:


title: Master's degree

text: Postgraduate studies in Israel require the completion of a bachelor's degree and is dependent upon this title's grades; see Education in Israel #Higher education.


title: Master's degree

text: There also exists "a direct track" doctorate degree, which lasts four to five years. Taking this route, students prepare a preliminary research paper during their first year, after which they must pass an exam before being allowed to proceed, at which point they are awarded a master's degree.


title: Master's degree

text: In Nepal, after completing a bachelor's degree, students must spend at least three or four years studying full-time in college and university, with an entrance test for those who wish to pursue master's, Ph.D., and doctorate degrees. All doctoral and Ph.D. degrees, as well as third cycle degrees, are research and experience oriented, with a focus on results.


title: Master's degree

text: After completing a successful bachelor's degree, students pursue master's degrees in engineering, education, and arts, as well as all law and medicine-related courses.


title: Master's degree

text: M.B.B.S. is only a medical degree with six and a half years of study resulting in a medical doctor and must finish its study in four years after master's degree with minimum education of 15 or 16 years of university bachelor's degree education.


title: Master's degree

text: In Taiwan, bachelor's degree courses are about four years in length, while an entrance examination is required for people who want to study for master's degrees and doctorates. The courses leading to these higher degrees are normally research-based.


title: Master's degree

text: Tuition is less expensive than would be the case in North America, costing as little as US$5000 for an M.B.A. As an incentive designed to increase foreign student numbers, the government and universities of Taiwan have redoubled their efforts to make a range of high-quality scholarships available in the form of university-specific scholarships that include tuition waivers of up to NT$20,000 per month. The government offers the Taiwan Scholarship amounting to NT$20,000–30,000 (US$18,000–24,000) for a two-year program.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon is a two-player board game played with counters and dice on tables boards. It is the most widespread Western member of the large family of tables games, whose ancestors date back nearly 5,000 years to the regions of Mesopotamia and Persia. The earliest record of backgammon itself dates to 17th-century England, being descended from the 16th-century game of Irish.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon is a two-player game of contrary movement in which each player has fifteen pieces, known traditionally as 'men' (short for 'tablemen') but increasingly known as 'checkers' in the US in recent decades. These pieces move along twenty-four 'points' according to the roll of two dice. The objective of the game is to move the fifteen pieces around the board and be first to "bear off", i.e., remove them from the board. The achievement of this while the opponent is still a long way behind results in a triple win known as a "backgammon", hence the name of the game.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon involves a combination of strategy and luck (from rolling dice). While the dice may determine the outcome of a single game, the better player will accumulate the better record over a series of many games. With each roll of the dice, players must choose from numerous options for moving their pieces and anticipate possible counter-moves by the opponent. The optional use of a doubling cube allows players to raise the stakes during the game.


title: Backgammon

text: Contrary to popular belief, backgammon is not the oldest board game in the world, nor are all tables games variants of backgammon. In fact, the earliest known mention of backgammon was in a letter dated 1635, when it was emerging as a variant of the popular mediaeval Anglo-Scottish game of Irish; the latter was described as a better game. By the 19th century, however, backgammon had spread to Europe, where it rapidly superseded other tables games like Trictrac in popularity, and also to America, where the doubling cube was introduced. In other parts of the world, different tables games such as Nard or Nardy are better known.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon is a recent member of the large family of tables games that date back to ancient times. The following is an overview of their development up to the time when backgammon appeared on the scene.


title: Backgammon

text: The history of board games can be traced back nearly 5,000 years to archaeological discoveries of the Jiroft culture, located in present-day Iran, the world's oldest game set comprising a board, counters and dice having been discovered in the region, but which game or games it was used to play is unknown. The Royal Game of Ur from 2600 BC may also be an ancestor or intermediate of modern-day table games like backgammon and is the oldest game for which rules have been handed down. It used tetrahedral dice. Various other board games spanning the 10th to 7th centuries BC have been found throughout modern day Iraq, Syria, Israel, Egypt and western Iran.


title: Backgammon

text: The Persian tables game of nard or nardšir emerged somewhere between the 3rd and 6th century AD, one text ("Kār-nāmag ī Ardaxšēr ī Pāpakān") linking it with Ardashir I (r. 224-41), founder of the Sasanian dynasty, whereas another ("Wičārišn ī čatrang ud nihišn ī nēw-ardaxšēr") attributes it to Bozorgmehr Bokhtagan, the vizier of Khosrow I (r. 531-79), who is credited with the invention of the game.


title: Backgammon

text: The earliest identifiable tables game, Tabula, meaning 'table' or 'board', is described in an epigram of Byzantine Emperor Zeno (AD 476–491). The overall aim was to be first to bear one's pieces off; the board had the typical tables layout, with 24 points, 12 on each side; and there were 15 counters per player. However, unlike modern Western backgammon, there were three cubical dice not two, no bar nor doubling die, and all counters started off the board. Modern backgammon follows the same rules as tabula for hitting a blot and for bearing off; and the rules for re-entering checkers in backgammon are the same as those for initially entering pieces in tabula. The name Tavla () is still used in Greece for various tables games, which are frequently played in town plateias and cafes.


title: Backgammon

text: The of Emperor Zeno's time is believed to be a direct descendant of the earlier Roman "Ludus duodecim scriptorum" ('Game of twelve lines') with the board's middle row of points removed, and only the two outer rows remaining. used a board with three rows of 12 points each, with the 15 pieces being moved in opposing directions by the two players across three rows according to the roll of the three cubical dice. Little specific text about the gameplay of has survived; it may have been related to the older Ancient Greek dice game "Kubeia". The earliest known mention of the game is in Ovid's "Ars Amatoria" ('The Art of Love'), written between 1 BC and 8 AD. In Roman times, this game was also known as "alea".


title: Backgammon

text: Tables games first appeared in France during the 11th century and became a favourite pastime of gamblers. In 1254, Louis IX issued a decree prohibiting his court officials and subjects from playing. They were played in Germany in the 12th century, and had reached Iceland by the 13th century. In Spain, the Alfonso X manuscript "Libro de los juegos", completed in 1283, describes rules for a number of dice and table games in addition to its discussion of chess. By the 17th century, games at tables had spread to Sweden. A wooden board and counters were recovered from the wreck of the "Vasa" among the belongings of the ship's officers. Tables games appear widely in paintings of this period, mainly those of Dutch and German painters, such as Van Ostade, Jan Steen, Hieronymus Bosch, and Bruegel. Among surviving artworks are "Cardsharps" by Caravaggio.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon's immediate predecessor was the 16th century tables game of Irish. Irish was the Anglo-Scottish equivalent of the French "Toutes Tables" and Spanish "Todas Tablas", the latter name first being used in the 1283 "El Libro de los Juegos", a translation of Arabic manuscripts by the Toledo School of Translators. Irish had been popular at the Scottish court of James IV and considered to be "the more serious and solid game" when the variant which became known as Backgammon began to emerge in the first half of the 17th century. In medieval Italy, Barail was played on a backgammon board, with the important difference that both players moved their pieces counter-clockwise and starting from the same side of the board. The game rules for Barail are recorded in a 13th century manuscript held in the Italian National Library in Florence.


title: Backgammon

text: The earliest mention of backgammon, under the name "Baggammon", was by James Howell in a letter dated 1635. In English, the word "backgammon" is most likely derived from "back" and , meaning "game" or "play". Meanwhile, the first use documented by the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1650. In 1666, it is reported that the "old name for backgammon used by Shakespeare and others" was Tables. However, it is clear from Willughby that "tables" was a generic name and that the phrase "playing at tables" was used in a similar way to "playing at cards". The first known rules of "Back Gammon" were produced by Francis Willughby around 1672; they were quickly followed by Charles Cotton in 1674.


title: Backgammon

text: In the 16th century, Elizabethan laws and church regulations had prohibited "playing at tables" in England, but by the 18th century, Backgammon had superseded Irish and become popular among the English clergy. Edmond Hoyle published "A Short Treatise on the Game of Back-Gammon" in 1753; this described rules and strategy for the game and was bound together with a similar text on whist.


title: Backgammon

text: The early form of backgammon was very similar to its predecessor, Irish. The aim, board, number of pieces or "men", direction of play and starting layout were the same as in the modern game. However, there was no doubling die, there was no bar on the board or the bar was not used (men simply being moved off the table when hit) and the scoring was different. The game was won double if either the winning throw was a doublet or the opponent still had men outside the home board. It was won triple if a player bore all men off before any of the opponent's men reached the home board; this was a "back-gammon". Some terminology, such as "point", "hitting a blot", "home", "doublet", "bear off" and "men" are recognisably the same as in the modern game; others, such as "binding a man" (adding a second man to a point) "binding up the tables" (taking all one's first 6 points), "fore game", "latter game", "nipping a man" (hitting a blot and playing it on forwards) "playing at length" (using both dice to move one man) are no longer in vogue.


title: Backgammon

text: By no later than 1850, the rules of play had changed to those used today. Tables boards were now made with a 'bar' in the centre and men that were hit went onto the bar. Winning double or by "two hits" was achieved by bearing all one's men off before the other has borne this was now called a "gammon". If the winner bore off all men while the loser still had men in his adversary's table, it was a "back-gammon" and worth "three hits," i.e., triple.


title: Backgammon

text: The most recent major development in backgammon was the addition of the doubling cube. Doubles had originally been recorded by placing "common parlour matches" on the bar in the centre of the board. A doubling cube was first introduced in the 1920s in New York City among members of gaming clubs in the Lower East Side. The cube required players not only to select the best move in a given position, but also to estimate the probability of winning from that position, transforming backgammon into the expected value-driven game played in the 20th and 21st centuries.


title: Backgammon

text: The popularity of backgammon surged in the mid-1960s, in part due to the charisma of Prince Alexis Obolensky who became known as "The Father of Modern Backgammon". "Obe", as he was called by friends, co-founded the International Backgammon Association, which published a set of official rules. He also established the World Backgammon Club of Manhattan, devised a backgammon tournament system in 1963, then organized the first major international backgammon tournament in March 1964, which attracted royalty, celebrities and the press. The game became a huge fad and was played on college campuses, in discothèques and at country clubs; stockbrokers and bankers began playing at conservative men's clubs. People young and old all across the country dusted off their boards and checkers. Cigarette, liquor and car companies began to sponsor tournaments, and Hugh Hefner held backgammon parties at the Playboy Mansion. Backgammon clubs were formed and tournaments were held, resulting in a World Championship promoted in Las Vegas in 1967.


title: Backgammon

text: In the second half of the 20th century, new terms were introduced in America, such as 'beaver' and 'checkers' (for men, although American backgammon experts Jacoby and Crawford continued to use both).


title: Backgammon

text: Most recently, the United States Backgammon Federation (USBGF) was organized in 2009 to repopularize the game in the United States. Board and committee members include many of the top players, tournament directors and writers in the worldwide backgammon community. The USBGF has recently created Standards of Ethical Practice to address issues on which tournament rules fail to touch.


title: Backgammon

text: In its country of origin, the UK Backgammon Federation is the national authority and runs a backgammon the Backgammon Galaxy UK Open as well as club championships, online leagues and knockout tournaments. Like the USBGF they are active members of the World Backgammon Federation (WBF) and their tournament rules have been adopted in their entirety by the WBF.


title: Backgammon

text: Since 2018, backgammon has been overseen internationally by the World Backgammon Federation who set the rules of play for international tournaments.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon playing pieces may be termed checkers, draughts, stones, men, counters, pawns, discs, pips, chips, or nips. Checkers is American English and is derived from the game of draughts which in the US is called checkers.


title: Backgammon

text: The objective is for players to bear off all their checkers from the board before their opponent can do the same. As the playing time for each individual game is short, it is often played in matches where victory is awarded to the first player to reach a certain number of points.


title: Backgammon

text: The dimensions of a board when opened, for a tournament game, should be at a minimum of 44 cm by 55 cm to a maximum of 66 cm by 88 cm.


title: Backgammon

text: Each side of the board has a track of 12 long triangles, called points. The points form a continuous track in the shape of a horseshoe, and are numbered from 1 to 24. In the most commonly used setup, each player begins with fifteen pieces; two are placed on their 24-point, three on their 8-point, and five each on their 13-point and their 6-point. The two players move their pieces in opposing directions, from the 24-point towards the 1-point.


title: Backgammon

text: Points 1 through 6 are called the home board or inner board, and points 7 through 12 are called the outer board. The 7-point is referred to as the bar point, and the 13-point as the midpoint. Usually the 5-point for each player is called the "golden point".


title: Backgammon

text: To start the game, each player rolls one die, and the player with the higher number moves first using the numbers shown on both dice. If the players roll the same number, they must roll again, leaving the first pair of dice on the board. The player with the higher number on the second roll moves using only the numbers shown on the dice used for the second roll. Both dice must land completely flat on the right-hand side of the gameboard. The players then take alternate turns, rolling two dice at the beginning of each turn.


title: Backgammon

text: After rolling the dice, players must, if possible, move their checkers according to the number shown on each die. For example, if the player rolls a 6 and a 3 (denoted as "6-3"), the player must move one checker six points forward, and another or the same checker three points forward. The same checker may be moved twice, as long as the two moves can be made separately and legally: six and then three, or three and then six. If a player rolls two of the same number, called doubles, that player must play each die twice. For example, a roll of 5-5 allows the player to make four moves of five spaces each. On any roll, a player must move according to the numbers on both dice if it is at all possible to do so. If one or both numbers do not allow a legal move, the player forfeits that portion of the roll and the turn ends. If moves can be made according to either one die or the other, but not both, the higher number must be used. If one die is unable to be moved, but such a move is made possible by the moving of the other die, that move is compulsory.


title: Backgammon

text: In the course of a move, a checker may land on any point that is unoccupied or is occupied by one or more of the player's own checkers. It may also land on a point occupied by exactly one opposing checker, or "blot". In this case, the blot has been "hit" and is placed in the middle of the board on the bar that divides the two sides of the playing surface. A checker may never land on a point occupied by two or more opposing checkers; thus, no point is ever occupied by checkers from both players simultaneously. There is no limit to the number of checkers that can occupy a point at any given time.


title: Backgammon

text: Checkers placed on the bar must re-enter the game through the opponent's home board before any other move can be made. A roll of 1 allows the checker to enter on the 24-point (opponent's 1), a roll of 2 on the 23-point (opponent's 2), and so forth, up to a roll of 6 allowing entry on the 19-point (opponent's 6). Checkers may not enter on a point occupied by two or more opposing checkers. Checkers can enter on unoccupied points, or on points occupied by a single opposing checker; in the latter case, the single checker is hit and placed on the bar. More than one checker can be on the bar at a time. A player may not move any other checkers until all checkers belonging to that player on the bar have re-entered the board. If a player has checkers on the bar, but rolls a combination that does not allow any of those checkers to re-enter, the player does not move. If the opponent's home board is completely "closed" (i.e. all six points are each occupied by two or more checkers), there is no roll that will allow a player to enter a checker from the bar, and that player stops rolling and playing until at least one point becomes open (occupied by one or zero checkers) due to the opponent's moves.


title: Backgammon

text: A play is not complete, and may be undone and replayed an unlimited number of times, until the player removes his or her dice from the board.


title: Backgammon

text: When all of a player's checkers are in that player's home board, that player may start removing them; this is called "bearing off". A roll of 1 may be used to bear off a checker from the 1-point, a 2 from the 2-point, and so on. If all of a player's checkers are on points lower than the number showing on a particular die, the player must use that die to bear off one checker from the highest occupied point. For example, if a player rolls a 6 and a 5, but has no checkers on the 6-point and two on the 5-point, then the 6 and the 5 must be used to bear off the two checkers from the 5-point. When bearing off, a player may also move a lower die roll before the higher even if that means the full value of the higher die is not fully utilized. For example, if a player has exactly one checker remaining on the 6-point, and rolls a 6 and a 1, the player may move the 6-point checker one place to the 5-point with the lower die roll of 1, and then bear that checker off the 5-point using the die roll of 6; this is sometimes useful tactically. As before, if there is a way to use all moves showing on the dice by moving checkers within the home board or by bearing them off, the player must do so. If a player's checker is hit while in the process of bearing off, that player may not bear off any others until it has been re-entered into the game and moved into the player's home board, according to the normal movement rules.


title: Backgammon

text: The first player to bear off all fifteen of their own checkers wins the game. When keeping score in backgammon, the points awarded depend on the scale of the victory. When each player is in the process of bearing off pieces and a winner emerges, that is called a “game” and is worth 1 point. If one player has not yet removed any pieces from the board OR has any pieces NOT in their home area, that is called a “gammon” and is worth 2 points. If the losing player has any pieces in their opponent’s home area OR up on the bar, that is called a “backgammon” and is worth 3 points.


title: Backgammon

text: To speed up match play and to provide an added dimension for strategy, a doubling cube is usually used. The doubling cube is not a die to be rolled, but rather a marker, with the numbers 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 inscribed on its sides to denote the current stake. At the start of each game, the doubling cube is placed on the midpoint of the bar with the number 64 showing; the cube is then said to be "centered, on 1". When the cube is still centered, either player may start their turn by proposing that the game be played for twice the current stakes. Their opponent must either accept ("take") the doubled stakes or resign ("drop") the game immediately.


title: Backgammon

text: Whenever a player accepts doubled stakes, the cube is placed on their side of the board with the corresponding power of two facing upward, to indicate that the right to redouble, which is to offer to continue doubling the stakes, belongs exclusively to that player. If the opponent drops the doubled stakes, they lose the game at the current value of the doubling cube. For instance, if the cube showed the number 2 and a player wanted to redouble the stakes to put it at 4, the opponent choosing to drop the redouble would lose two, or twice the original stake.


title: Backgammon

text: There is no limit on the number of redoubles. Although 64 is the highest number depicted on the doubling cube, the stakes may rise to 128, 256, and so on. In money games, a player is often permitted to "beaver" when offered the cube, doubling the value of the game again, while retaining possession of the cube.


title: Backgammon

text: A variant of the doubling cube "beaver" is the "raccoon". Players who doubled their opponent, seeing the opponent beaver the cube, may in turn then double the stakes once again ("raccoon") as part of that cube phase before any dice are rolled. The opponent retains the doubling cube. An example of a "raccoon" is the following: White doubles Black to 2 points, Black accepts then beavers the cube to 4 points; White, confident of a win, raccoons the cube to 8 points, while Black retains the cube. Such a move adds greatly to the risk of having to face the doubling cube coming back at 8 times its original value when first doubling the opponent (offered at 2 points, counter offered at 16 points) should the luck of the dice change.


title: Backgammon

text: Some players may opt to invoke the "Murphy rule" or the "automatic double rule". If both opponents roll the same opening number, the doubling cube is incremented on each occasion yet remains in the middle of the board, available to either player. The Murphy rule may be invoked with a maximum number of automatic doubles allowed and that limit is agreed to prior to a game or match commencing. When a player decides to double the opponent, the value is then a double of whatever face value is shown (e.g. if two automatic doubles have occurred putting the cube up to 4, the first in-game double will be for 8 points). The Murphy rule is not an official rule in backgammon and is rarely, if ever, seen in use at officially sanctioned tournaments.


title: Backgammon

text: The "Jacoby rule", named after Oswald Jacoby, allows gammons and backgammons to count for their respective double and triple values only if the cube has already been offered and accepted. This encourages a player with a large lead to double, possibly ending the game, rather than to play it to conclusion hoping for a gammon or backgammon. The Jacoby rule is widely used in money play but is not used in match play.


title: Backgammon

text: The "Crawford rule", named after John R. Crawford, is designed to make match play more equitable for the player in the lead. If a player is one point away from winning a match, that player's opponent will always want to double as early as possible in order to catch up. Whether the game is worth one point or two, the trailing player must win to continue the match. To balance the situation, the Crawford rule requires that when a player first reaches a score one point short of winning, neither player may use the doubling cube for the following game, called the "Crawford game". After the Crawford game, normal use of the doubling cube resumes. The Crawford rule is routinely used in tournament match play. It is possible for a Crawford game to never occur in a match.


title: Backgammon

text: If the Crawford rule is in effect, then another option is the "Holland rule", named after Tim Holland, which stipulates that after the Crawford game, a player cannot double until after at least two rolls have been played by each side. It was common in tournament play in the 1980s, but is now rarely used.


title: Backgammon

text: Minor variations to the standard game are common among casual players in certain regions. For instance, only allowing a maximum of five men on any point (Britain) or disallowing "hit-and-run" in the home board (Middle East).


title: Backgammon

text: There are also many relatives of backgammon within the tables family with different aims, modes of play and strategies. Some are played primarily throughout one geographic region, and others add new tactical elements to the game. These other tables games commonly have a different starting position, restrict certain moves, or assign special value to certain dice rolls, but in some geographic games even the rules and direction of movement of the counters change, rendering them fundamentally different.


title: Backgammon

text: "Acey-deucey" is a relative of backgammon in which players start with no counters on the board, and must enter them onto the board at the beginning of the game. The roll of 1-2 is given special consideration, allowing the player, after moving the 1 and the 2, to select any desired doubles move. A player also receives an extra turn after a roll of 1-2 or of doubles.


title: Backgammon

text: "Hypergammon" is a game in which players have only three counters on the board, starting with one each on the 24, 23 and 22 points. With the aid of a computer this game was solved by Hugh Sconyers around 1994, meaning that exact equities for all cube positions are available for all 32 million possible positions.


title: Backgammon

text: "Nard" is a traditional tables game from Persia which may be an ancestor of backgammon. It has a different opening layout in which all 15 pieces start on the 24th point. During play pieces may not be hit and there are no gammons or backgammons.


title: Backgammon

text: "Russian backgammon" is a variant described in 1895 as: "...much in vogue in Russia, Germany, and other parts of the Continent...". Players start with no counters on the board, and both players move in the same direction to bear off in a common home board. In this variant, doubles are powerful: four moves are played as in backgammon, followed by four moves according to the difference of the dice value from 7, and then the player has another turn (with the caveat that the turn ends if any portion of it cannot be completed).


title: Backgammon

text: "Gul bara" and "Tapa" are tables games popular in south-eastern Europe and Turkey. The play will iterate among Backgammon, Gul Bara, and Tapa until one of the players reaches a score of 7 or 5.


title: Backgammon

text: "Plakoto", "Fevga" and "Portes" are three varieties of tables games played in Greece. Together, the three are referred to as "Tavli" and are usually played one after the other; game being three, five, or seven points.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon has an established opening theory, although it is less detailed than that of chess. The tree of positions expands rapidly because of the number of possible dice rolls and the moves available on each turn. Recent computer analysis has offered more insight on opening plays, but the midgame is reached quickly. After the opening, backgammon players frequently rely on some established general strategies, combining and switching among them to adapt to the changing conditions of a game.


title: Backgammon

text: A blot has the highest probability of being hit when it is 6 points away from an opponent's checker. Strategies can derive from that. The most direct one is simply to avoid being hit, trapped, or held in a stand-off. A "running game" describes a strategy of moving as quickly as possible around the board, and is most successful when a player is already ahead in the race. When this fails, one may opt for a "holding game", maintaining control of a point on one's opponent's side of the board, called an anchor. As the game progresses, this player may gain an advantage by hitting an opponent's blot from the anchor, or by rolling large doubles that allow the checkers to escape into a running game.


title: Backgammon

text: The "priming game" involves building a wall of checkers, called a prime, covering a number of consecutive points. This obstructs opposing checkers that are behind the prime. A checker trapped behind a six-point prime cannot escape until the prime is broken. A particularly successful priming effort may lead to a "blitz", which is a strategy of covering the entire home board as quickly as possible while keeping one's opponent on the bar. Because the opponent has difficulty re-entering from the bar or escaping, a player can quickly gain a running advantage and win the game, often with a gammon.


title: Backgammon

text: A "backgame" is a strategy that involves holding two or more anchors in an opponent's home board while being substantially behind in the race. The anchors obstruct the opponent's checkers and create opportunities to hit them as they move home. The backgame is generally used only to salvage a game wherein a player is already significantly behind. Using a backgame as an initial strategy is usually unsuccessful.


title: Backgammon

text: "Duplication" refers to the placement of checkers such that one's opponent needs the same dice rolls to achieve different goals. For example, players may position all of their blots in such a way that the opponent must roll a 2 in order to hit any of them, reducing the probability of being hit more than once. "Diversification" refers to a complementary tactic of placing one's own checkers in such a way that more numbers are useful.


title: Backgammon

text: Many positions require a measurement of a player's standing in the race, for example, in making a doubling cube decision, or in determining whether to run home and begin bearing off. The minimum total of pips needed to move a player's checkers around and off the board is called the "pip count". The difference between the two players' pip counts is frequently used as a measure of the leader's racing advantage. Players often use mental calculation techniques to determine pip counts in live play.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon is played in two principal variations, "money" and "match" play. Money play means that every point counts evenly and every game stands alone, whether money is actually being wagered or not. "Match" play means that the players play until one side scores (or exceeds) a certain number of points. The format has a significant effect on strategy. In a match, the objective is not to win the maximum possible number of points, but rather to simply reach the score needed to win the match. For example, a player leading a 9-point match by a score of 7–5 would be very reluctant to turn the doubling cube, as their opponent could take and make a costless redouble to 4, placing the entire outcome of the match on the current game. Conversely, the trailing player would double very aggressively, particularly if they have chances to win a gammon in the current game. In money play, the theoretically correct checker play and cube action would never vary based on the score.


title: Backgammon

text: In 1975, Emmet Keeler and Joel Spencer considered the question of when to double or accept a double using an idealized version of backgammon. In their idealized version, the probability of winning varies randomly over time by Brownian motion, and there are no gammons or backgammons. They showed that the optimal time to offer a double was when the probability of winning reached 80%, and it is wise to accept a double only if the probability of winning is at least 20%. As their assumptions do not correspond perfectly to the real game, actual doubling strategy may vary, but the 80% number still provides a possible rule of thumb.


title: Backgammon

text: To reduce the possibility of cheating, most good-quality backgammon sets use precision dice and a dice cup. This reduces the likelihood of loaded dice being used, which is the main way of cheating in face-to-face play. A common method of cheating online is the use of a computer program to find the optimal move on each turn; to combat this, many online sites use move-comparison software that identifies when a player's moves resemble those of a backgammon program. Online cheating has therefore become extremely difficult.


title: Backgammon

text: In "State of Oregon v. Barr", a 1982 court case pivotal to the continued widespread organised playing of backgammon in the US, the State argued that backgammon is a game of chance and that it was therefore subject to Oregon's stringent gambling laws. Paul Magriel was a key witness for the defence, contradicting Roger Nelson, the expert prosecution witness, by saying, "Game theory, however, really applies to games with imperfect knowledge, where something is concealed, such as poker. Backgammon is not such a game. Everything is in front of you. The person who uses that information in the most effective manner will win." After the closing arguments, Judge Stephen S. Walker concluded that backgammon is a game of skill, not a game of chance, and found the defendant, backgammon tournament director Ted Barr, not guilty of promoting gambling.


title: Backgammon

text: Enthusiasts have formed clubs for social play of backgammon. Local clubs may hold informal gatherings, with members meeting at cafés and bars in the evening to play and converse. A few clubs offer additional services, maintaining their own facilities or offering computer analysis of troublesome plays. Around 2003, some club leaders noticed a growth of interest in backgammon, and attributed it to the game's popularity on the Internet.


title: Backgammon

text: A backgammon chouette permits three or more players to participate in a single game, often for money. One player competes against a team of all the other participants, and positions rotate after each game. Chouette play often permits the use of multiple doubling cubes.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon clubs may also organize tournaments. Large club tournaments sometimes draw competitors from other regions, with final matches viewed by hundreds of spectators. The top players at regional tournaments often compete in major national and international championships. Winners at major tournaments may receive prizes of tens of thousands of dollars.


title: Backgammon

text: Starting in January 2018, tournament directors began awarding GammonPoints, a free points registry for tournament directors and players, with GammonPoint awards based on the number of players and strength of field.


title: Backgammon

text: The first world championship competition in backgammon was held in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1967. Tim Holland was declared the winner that year and at the tournament the following year. For unknown reasons, there was no championship in 1970, but in 1971, Tim Holland again won the title. The competition remained in Las Vegas until 1975, when it moved to Paradise Island in the Bahamas. The years 1976, 1977 and 1978 saw "dual" World Championships, one in the Bahamas attended by the Americans, and the "European Open Championships" in Monte Carlo with mostly European players. In 1979, Lewis Deyong, who had promoted the Bahamas World Championship for the prior three years, suggested that the two events be combined. Monte Carlo was universally acknowledged as the site of the World Backgammon Championship and has remained as such for thirty years. The Monte Carlo tournament draws hundreds of players and spectators, and is played over the course of a week.


title: Backgammon

text: By the 21st century, the largest international tournaments had established the basis of a tour for top professional players. Major tournaments are held yearly worldwide. PartyGaming sponsored the first World Series of Backgammon in 2006 from Cannes and later the "Backgammon Million" tournament held in the Bahamas in January 2007 with a prize pool of one million dollars, the largest for any tournament to date. In 2008, the World Series of Backgammon ran the world's largest international events in London, the UK Masters, the biggest tournament ever held in the UK with 128 international class players; the Nordic Open, which instantly became the largest in the world with around 500 players in all flights and 153 in the championship, and Cannes, which hosted the Riviera Cup, the traditional follow-up tournament to the World Championships. Cannes also hosted the WSOB championship, the WSOB finale, which saw 16 players play three-point shootout matches for €160,000. The event was recorded for television in Europe and aired on Eurosport.


title: Backgammon

text: The World Backgammon Association (WBA) has been holding the biggest backgammon tour on the circuit since 2007, the "European Backgammon Tour" (EBGT). In 2011, the WBA collaborated with the online backgammon provider Play65 for the 2011 season of the European Backgammon Tour and with "Betfair" in 2012. The 2013 season of the European Backgammon Tour featured 11 stops and 19 qualified players competing for €19,000 in a grand finale in Lefkosa, Northern Cyprus.


title: Backgammon

text: When backgammon is played for money, the most common arrangement is to assign a monetary value to each point, and to play to a certain score, or until either player chooses to stop. The stakes are raised by gammons, backgammons, and use of the doubling cube. Backgammon is sometimes available in casinos. Before the commercialization of artificial neural network programs, proposition bets on specific positions were very common among backgammon players and gamblers. As with most gambling games, successful play requires a combination of luck and skill, as a single dice roll can sometimes significantly change the outcome of the game.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon is considered the national game in many countries of the Eastern Mediterranean: Egypt, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Greece.


title: Backgammon

text: The popularity of the game across the region is primarily an oral tradition, and appears to have been strengthened during the era of the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the whole Eastern Mediterranean in the early modern period. Afif Bahnassi, Syria’s director of antiquities, stated in 1988: “For some reason, backgammon became the rage of the Ottoman Empire. It really spread across the Arab world with the Turks, and it stayed behind when they left.” The game is a common feature of coffeehouses throughout the region. Since at least the early 19th century, Damascus became well known as the preeminent location for Damascene-style wooden marquetry backgammon sets that have become famous throughout the region.


title: Backgammon

text: A unique feature of backgammon throughout the region is players' use of mixed Persian and Turkish numbers to announce dice rolls, rather than Arabic or other local languages. Related to this phenomenon, the game is frequently referred to as "Shesh Besh", which is a rhyming combination "shesh", meaning six in Farsi (as well as many historical and current Semitic languages), and "besh", meaning five in Turkish. "Shesh besh" is commonly used to refer to when a player scores a 5 and 6 at the same time on dice. This language contains six types of irregular inflections:


title: Backgammon

text: In the early 20th century, as use of Classical Arabic was being promoted with the rise of Arab nationalism, efforts were made to replace the Persian-Turkish numbers used in backgammon play.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon software has been developed not only to play and analyze games, but also to people to play one another over the internet. Dice rolls are provided by random or pseudorandom number generators. Real-time online play began with the First Internet Backgammon Server in July 1992, but there are now a range of options, many of which are commercial.


title: Backgammon

text: Backgammon has been studied considerably by computer scientists. Neural networks and other approaches have offered significant advances to software for gameplay and analysis. With 15 white and 15 black counters and 24 possible positions, backgammon has 18 quintillion possible legal positions.


title: Backgammon

text: The first strong computer opponent was BKG 9.8. It was written by Hans Berliner in the late 1970s on a DEC PDP-10 as an experiment in evaluating board game positions. Early versions of BKG played badly even against poor players, but Berliner noticed that its critical mistakes were always at transitional phases in the game. He applied principles of fuzzy logic to improve its play between phases, and by July 1979, BKG 9.8 was strong enough to play against the reigning world champion Luigi Villa. It won the match 7–1, becoming the first computer program to defeat a world champion in any board game. Berliner stated that the victory was largely a matter of luck, as the computer received more favorable dice rolls.


title: Backgammon

text: In the late 1980s, backgammon programmers found more success with an approach based on artificial neural networks. TD-Gammon, developed by Gerald Tesauro of IBM, was the first of these programs to play near the expert level. Its neural network was trained using temporal difference learning applied to data generated from self-play. According to assessments by Bill Robertie and Kit Woolsey, TD-Gammon's play was at or above the level of the top human players in the world. Woolsey said of the program that "There is no question in my mind that its positional judgment is far better than mine."


title: Backgammon

text: Tesauro proposed using rollout analysis to compare the performance of computer algorithms against human players. In this method, a Monte-Carlo evaluation of positions is conducted (typically thousands of trials) where different random dice sequences are simulated. The rollout score of the human (or the computer) is the difference of the average game results by following the selected move versus following the best move, then averaged for the entire set of taken moves.


title: Backgammon

text: Neural network research has resulted in three modern proprietary programs, JellyFish, Snowie and eXtreme Gammon, as well as the shareware BGBlitz and the free software GNU Backgammon. These programs not only play the game, but offer tools for analyzing games and detailed comparisons of individual moves. The strength of these programs lies in their neural networks' weights tables, which are the result of months of training. Without them, these programs play no better than a human novice. For the bearoff phase, backgammon software usually relies on a database containing precomputed equities for all possible bearoff positions. There are 54,263 bearoff positions for each side. This means there are 54263 total bearoff positions (~3 billion positions). In 1981 Hugh Sconyers wrote a computer program that solved all positions with nine checkers or fewer for both sides. In the early 1990’s Hugh extended his results to all bearoff positions. For each position there are four results: no cube, roller’s cube, center cube and opponent’s cube. So, Hugh’s bearoff database contains the exact answers to ~12 billion bearoff situations.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Professional wrestling is a form of theater that revolves around staged wrestling matches. The mock combat aspect of professional wrestling is performed in a ring similar to the kind used in boxing. The dramatic aspects of wrestling may be performed in the ring or—in televised wrestling shows—in backstage areas of the venue, in similar form to reality television.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Professional wrestling as a form of theater evolved out of the widespread practice of match fixing among wrestlers in the early 20th century, which became so prevalent that by the 1930s the public perceived professional wrestling as a form of performance art rather than a sport. Professional wrestlers responded to the public's attitude by dispensing with verisimilitude in favor of entertainment, mixing in melodrama and outlandish stuntwork into their performances. Although the mock combat the wrestlers performed ceased to resemble any authentic wrestling form, the wrestlers nevertheless continued to pretend that it was authentic, and the fans played along—this is a tradition known as "kayfabe".


title: Professional wrestling

text: In Professional wrestling matches, performers often execute a series of pre-planned moves and attacks, ranging from grappling and throws found in traditional forms of wrestling, to more spectacular stunts, sometimes involving props and special effects. The moves used during these matches are designed to appear dramatic whilst reducing the risk of serious injury as much as possible. Overall, the performers aim to minimize the actual injurious impact of their moves while maximizing their entertainment value. Shows produced by the largest professional wrestling promotions like WWE are traditionally performed in indoor venues before live audience, flagship events in this profession like WrestleMania are sometimes staged at outdoor venues. These shows are generally video recorded for live or delayed broadcasting for an audience all over the world. Additionally filmed footage known as “segments” or “promos” are usually used to accompany the drama in these shows.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Prior experience in legitimate wrestling is not a requirement for aspiring professional wrestlers, but is seen as an advantageous background. Despite its scripted format, there are, and have been, numerous performers throughout the history of professional wrestling who have had prior experience in legitimate wrestling or combat sports, before transitioning to its theatrical form. Kurt Angle, the first Olympic gold medalist in professional wrestling history, having won his gold medal at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in freestyle wrestling, is a popular wrestler. Brock Lesnar is another prominent performer who is a former NCAA Wrestler and won the NCAA Division I National Championship in 2000.


title: Professional wrestling

text: In America following the civil war of 1861-1865, wrestling was a popular sport, with catch wrestling emerging as the most popular style. At first, professional wrestlers were genuine competitive athletes, but towards the end of the century, wrestlers increasingly rigged their matches, agreeing with each other in advance as to who would be the winner. By the turn of the century, almost all professional wrestling matches were fake ("worked" matches, per the industry jargon).


title: Professional wrestling

text: There were a number of reasons why professional wrestling became fake whereas boxing endured as a legitimate sport. Underlying the historical factors is that wrestling is easier to fake than boxing. In a rigged boxing match, the designated loser must take a real beating in order for his "defeat" to be convincing, but wrestling holds can be faked convincingly without inflicting serious injury.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Boxing was more tightly regulated than wrestling. In the early years of the 20th century, boxing suffered periodic bans in various states and counties over concerns over match fixing. Professional wrestling somehow escaped similar bans even though match fixing was even more rife there, which suggests that the public did not care about the integrity of professional wrestling and accepted it as performance art.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Authentic wrestling matches were often long and boring. This was particularly true for Greco-Roman wrestling, but sometimes true for catch wrestling as well. Wrestlers found that by faking their matches, they could make them look more exciting and shorter in duration.


title: Professional wrestling

text: A major influence on professional wrestling was carnival culture. Wrestlers around the turn of the 20th century sometimes worked as carnival attractions. For a fee, a visitor could challenge the wrestler to a quick match. If the challenger defeated the champion in a short time frame, usually 15 minutes, he won a prize. Such carnival wrestlers used catch wrestling because they could quickly defeat their challenger with a painful hold. To encourage visitors, the carnival operators staged rigged matches in which a plant in the audience challenged the champion and won, giving the audience the impression that the champion was easy to beat. This practice taught wrestlers the art of staging rigged matches and fostered a mentality that spectators were marks to be duped. The term "kayfabe" is thought to have come from carny slang.


title: Professional wrestling

text: By the turn of the 20th century, most wrestling matches were rigged, and journalists regularly exposed the practice.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Promotional cartels for professional wrestling emerged in the 1910s in the East Coast of the United States (up to that point, professional wrestling's heartland was in the Midwest). The promoters routinely fixed the matches to make them more entertaining. For instance, it allowed them to artificially turn their more charismatic wrestlers into champions; audiences preferred charismatic champions to boorish ones. Fixing matches was also more convenient for scheduling. With shoot matches, a promoter would often have to wait to see who won the match before making further plans with either participant. Fixed matches were also less strenuous for the wrestlers, thereby allowing them to recover faster and perform more frequently.


title: Professional wrestling

text: The promoter cartels quashed what little authenticity professional wrestling still had. Before the cartels, professional wrestlers occasionally had to fight authentic (shoot) matches in order to preserve their credibility. But as promoters gained control over more of the country's wrestlers, there were fewer independent wrestlers who could publicly challenge the promoters' wrestlers to shoot matches. And if it did so happen that an independent wrestler made a public challenge, the cartel wrestler could use his contractual obligations to his promoter as an excuse to refuse the challenge. Some promoters even used "policemen" to deter independent wrestlers from challenging their stars. These policemen were powerful wrestlers who lacked the charisma to become stars themselves. The independent would be forced to face the policeman first, and the policeman would give the independent a vicious thrashing that would put fear in him and force him to spend a long time recovering.


title: Professional wrestling

text: By the early 1930s, most wrestlers had adopted personas to generate public interest. These personas could broadly be characterized as either "faces" (likeable) or "heels" (villainous). Wrestling matches often became metaphors for broader themes, such as good vs evil or city-slicker vs country boy.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Wrestling promoters struggled to find wrestlers who were both trained in authentic wrestling forms and had charisma. Towards the end of the 1930s, faced with declining revenues, promoters chose to focus on grooming wrestlers who could draw crowds regardless of their skill. By this time, most of the public knew and accepted that professional wrestling was performance art, so a background in authentic wrestling no longer mattered. After this, matches became more outlandish and gimmicky, and any semblance professional wrestling had to catch wrestling faded. The personas of the wrestlers likewise grew more outlandish. Although the wrestlers no longer cared to make their mock combat look convincing, they still pretended it was authentic. "Kayfabe" persisted until the 1990s.


title: Professional wrestling

text: In 1989, Vince McMahon testified before the New Jersey Athletic Commission that professional wrestling is not a competitive sport and that its matches have predetermined outcomes. He did this to have the World Wrestling Federation (his business) exempted from sports licensing fees. Shortly thereafter, New Jersey deregulated professional wrestling. The WWF was the first professional wrestling promotion to rebrand itself as an entertainment company rather than a true sports organization.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Show wrestling has become especially prominent in Central/North America, Japan and Europe (especially the United Kingdom). In Brazil, there was a very popular wrestling television program from the 1960s to the early 1980s called "Telecatch". High-profile figures in the sport have become celebrities or cultural icons in their native or adopted home countries.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Although professional wrestling started out as small acts in sideshows, traveling circuses and carnivals, today it is a billion-dollar industry. Revenue is drawn from ticket sales, network television broadcasts, pay-per-view broadcasts, branded merchandise and home video. Pro wrestling was instrumental in making pay-per-view a viable method of content delivery. Annual shows such as WrestleMania, Bound for Glory, Wrestle Kingdom and formerly Starrcade are among the highest-selling pay-per-view programming each year. In modern day, internet programming has been utilized by a number of companies to air web shows, internet pay per views (IPPVs) or on-demand content, helping to generate internet-related revenue earnings from the evolving World Wide Web.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Home video sales dominate the Billboard charts Recreational Sports DVD sales, with wrestling holding anywhere from 3 to 9 of the top 10 spots every week.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Due to its persistent cultural presence and to its novelty within the performing arts, wrestling constitutes a recurring topic in both academia and the media. Several documentaries have been produced looking at professional wrestling, most notable of them being "Beyond the Mat" directed by Barry W. Blaustein, and "" featuring wrestler Bret Hart and directed by Paul Jay. There have also been many fictional depictions of wrestling; the 2008 film "The Wrestler" received several Oscar nominations and began a career revival for its star Mickey Rourke.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Currently, the largest professional wrestling company worldwide is the United States-based WWE, which bought out many smaller regional companies in the late 20th century, as well as primary competitors World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) in early 2001. Other major companies worldwide include All Elite Wrestling (AEW) in the United States, Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL), and Lucha Libre AAA Worldwide (AAA) in Mexico; and the Japanese New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW), All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW), and Pro Wrestling Noah promotions.


title: Professional wrestling

text: When talking about professional wrestling, there are two levels: the "in-show" happenings that are presented through the shows, and happenings which are outside the scope of performance (in other words, are real life) but have implications on the performance, such as performer contracts, legitimate injuries, etc. Because actual events are often co-opted by writers for incorporation into storylines for the performers, the lines are often blurred and become confused.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Special care must be taken when talking about people who perform under their own name (such as Kurt Angle and his fictional persona). The actions of the character should be considered fictional events, wholly separate from the life of the performer. This is similar to other entertainers who perform with a persona that shares their own name.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Some wrestlers incorporate elements of their real-life personalities into their characters, even if they and their in-ring persona have different names.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Those who participated felt that maintenance of a constant and complete illusion for all who were not involved was necessary to keep audience interest. For decades, wrestlers lived their public lives as though they were their characters.


title: Professional wrestling

text: The practice of keeping the illusion, and the various methods used to do so, came to be known as "kayfabe" within wrestling circles, or "working the marks". An entire lexicon of slang jargon and euphemism developed to allow performers to communicate without outsiders' knowledge of what was being said.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Occasionally a performer will deviate from the intended sequence of events. This is known as a shoot. Sometimes shoot-like elements are included in wrestling stories to blur the line between performance and reality. These are known as "worked shoots". The vast majority of events in professional wrestling are preplanned and improvised within accepted boundaries.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Gradually, the predetermined nature of professional wrestling became an open secret, as prominent figures in the wrestling business (including World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon) began to publicly admit that wrestling was entertainment, not competition. This public reveal has garnered mixed reactions from the wrestling community, as some feel that exposure ruins the experience to the spectators as does exposure in illusionism. Despite the public admission of the theatrical nature of professional wrestling, many U.S. states still regulate professional wrestling as they do other professional competitive sports. For example, New York State still regulates "professional wrestling" through the New York State Athletic Commission (SAC). Some states are considering removing, or have removed, professional wrestling from the purview of the state's athletic commissioners.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Professional wrestling shows can be considered a form of theater in the round, with the ring, ringside area, and entryway comprising a stage. There is less of a fourth wall than in most theatric performances, similar to pantomime involving audience participation. The audience is recognized and acknowledged by the performers as spectators to the sporting event being portrayed, and are encouraged to interact as such. This leads to a high level of audience participation; in fact, their reactions can dictate how the performance unfolds. Often, individual matches will be part of a longer story line conflict between "babyfaces" (often shortened to just "faces") and "heels". "Faces" (the "good guys") are those whose actions are intended to encourage the audience to cheer, while "heels" (the "bad guys") act to draw the spectators' ire.


title: Professional wrestling

text: While each wrestling match is ostensibly a competition of athletics and strategy, the goal from a business standpoint is to excite and entertain the audience. Although the competition is staged, dramatic emphasis draws out the most intense reaction. Heightened interest results in higher attendance, increased ticket sales, higher ratings on television broadcasts (greater ad revenue), higher pay-per-view buyrates, and sales of branded merchandise and recorded video footage. All of these contribute to the profit of the promotion company.


title: Professional wrestling

text: In Latin America and English-speaking countries, most wrestlers (and other on-stage performers) portray character roles, sometimes with personalities wildly different from their own. These personalities are a gimmick intended to heighten interest in a wrestler without regard to athletic ability. Some can be unrealistic and cartoon-like (such as Doink the Clown), while others carry more verisimilitude (such as Chris Jericho, The Rock, John Cena, Steve Austin, and CM Punk). In lucha libre, many characters wear masks, adopting a secret identity akin to a superhero or a supervillain, a near-sacred tradition.


title: Professional wrestling

text: An individual wrestler may use his real name, or a minor variation of it, for much of his career, such as Bret Hart, John Cena and Randy Orton. Others can keep one ring name for their entire career (Shawn Michaels, CM Punk and Ricky Steamboat), or may change from time to time to better suit the demands of the audience or company. Sometimes a character is owned and trademarked by the company, forcing the wrestler to find a new one when he leaves (although a simple typeset change, such as changing Rhyno to Rhino, can get around this), and sometimes a character is owned by the wrestler. Sometimes, a wrestler may change his legal name to obtain ownership of his ring name (Andrew Martin and Warrior). Many wrestlers (such as The Rock and The Undertaker) are strongly identified with their character, even responding to the name in public or between friends. Proper decorum is for wrestlers to refer to each other by their stage names/characters rather than their birth/legal names, unless otherwise introduced. A character can become so popular that it appears in other media (Hulk Hogan and El Santo) or even gives the performer enough visibility to enter politics (Antonio Inoki and Jesse Ventura).


title: Professional wrestling

text: Typically, matches are staged between a protagonist (historically an audience favorite, known as a babyface, or "the good guy") and an antagonist (historically a villain with arrogance, a tendency to break rules, or other unlikable qualities, called a heel, or "the bad guy"). In recent years, antiheroes have also become prominent in professional wrestling. There is also a less common role of a "tweener", who is neither fully face nor fully heel yet able to play either role effectively (case in point, Samoa Joe during his first run in Impact Wrestling from June 2005 to November 2006).


title: Professional wrestling

text: At times, a character may "turn", altering their face/heel alignment. This may be an abrupt, surprising event, or it may slowly build over time. It is almost always accomplished with a markable change in behavior. Some turns become defining points in a career, as when Hulk Hogan turned heel after being a top face for over a decade. Others may have no noticeable effect on the character's status. If a character repeatedly switches between face and heel, this lessens the effect of such turns, and may result in apathy from the audience. Big Show is a good example of having more heel and face turns than anyone in WWE history. Sometimes a character's heel turn will become so popular that eventually the audience response will alter the character's heel-face cycle to the point where the heel persona will, in practice, become a face persona, and what was previously the face persona, will turn into the heel persona, such as when Dwayne Johnson first began using "The Rock" persona as a heel character, as opposed to his original "Rocky Maivia" babyface persona. Another legendary example is Stone Cold Steve Austin, who was originally booked as a heel, with such mannerisms as drinking on the job, using profanity, breaking company property, and even breaking into people's private homes. The fans' response to Austin was so positive that he effectively became one of the most popular antiheroes in professional wrestling. Austin, along with the stable of D-Generation X, Bret Hart and his Hart Foundation, is generally credited with ushering the Attitude Era of WWF programming.


title: Professional wrestling

text: While real exhibition matches are now not uncommon, most matches tell a story analogous to an episode of a serial drama: the face will from time to time win (triumph) or from time to time lose (tragedy), and longer story arcs can result from a couple of matches. Since most promotions have a championship title, opposition for the championship is a frequent impetus for stories. For added stakes, anything from a character's own hair to his job can be wagered in a match.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Some matches are designed to further the story of only one participant. It could be intended to portray an unstoppable force, a lucky underdog, a sore loser, or any other characterization. Sometimes non-wrestling vignettes are shown to enhance a character's image without the need for matches.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Other stories result from a natural rivalry. Outside of performance, these are referred to as feuds. A feud can exist between any number of participants and can last from a few days to decades. The feud between Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat lasted from the late 1970s into the early 1990s and allegedly spanned over two thousand matches (although most of those matches were mere dark matches). The career-spanning history between characters Mike Awesome and Masato Tanaka is another example of a long-running feud, as is the case of Steve Austin vs. Vince McMahon, one of the most lucrative feuds in the World Wrestling Federation during 1998 and 1999.


title: Professional wrestling

text: In theory, the longer a feud is built up, the more audience interest (aka heat) lasts. The main event of a wrestling show is generally the most heated. Commonly, a heel will hold the upper hand over a face until a final showdown, heightening dramatic tension as the face's fans desire to see him win.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Throughout the history of professional wrestling, many other elements of media have been utilized in professional wrestling storytelling: pre- and post-match interviews, "backstage" skits, positions of authority and worked behind-the-scenes feuds, division rankings (typically the #1-contendership spot), contracts, lotteries, news stories on websites, and in recent years social media.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Anything that can be used as an element of drama can exist in professional wrestling stories: romantic relationships (including love triangles and marriage), racism, classism, nepotism, favoritism, corporate corruption, family bonds, personal histories, grudges, theft, cheating, assault, betrayal, bribery, seduction, stalking, confidence tricks, extortion, blackmail, substance abuse, self-doubt, self-sacrifice; even kidnapping, sexual fetishism, necrophilia, misogyny, rape and death have been portrayed in wrestling. Some promotions have included supernatural elements such as magic, curses, the undead and Satanic imagery (most notably the Undertaker and his Ministry of Darkness, a stable that regularly performed evil rituals and human sacrifice in Satanic-like worship of a hidden power figure).


title: Professional wrestling

text: Commentators have become important in communicating the relevance of the characters' actions to the story at hand, filling in past details and pointing out subtle actions that may otherwise go unnoticed.


title: Professional wrestling

text: A main part of the story-telling part of wrestling is a promo, short for promotional interview. Promos are performed, or "cut" in wrestling jargon, for a variety of reasons, including to heighten interest in a wrestler, or to hype an upcoming match.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Since the crowd is often too loud or the venue too large for promos to be heard naturally, wrestlers will use amplification when speaking in the ring. Unlike most Hollywood acting, large and highly visible handheld microphones are typically used and wrestlers often speak directly to the audience.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Professional wrestling mimics the structure of title match combat sports. Participants compete for a championship and must defend it after winning it. These titles are represented physically by a title belt that can be worn by the champion. In the case of team wrestling, there is a title belt for each member of the team.


title: Professional wrestling

text: Almost all professional wrestling promotions have one major title, and some have more. Championships are designated by divisions of weight, height, gender, wrestling style and other qualifications.