To be completely honest, I am sure there were other contributing factors, but most of the lawyers and therapists seem to agree that if it hadn’t been for backgammon, our marriage would have been pretty much normal.

That’s not to say we wouldn’t be divorced anyway. If she had only listened to me and made the 5 point in our doubles match earlier in the evening, we would have still been playing and I wouldn’t have even met those incredible, amazing, lovely young ladies in the bar.

I guess I should start from the beginning. When we married, she didn’t have the slighted idea what backgammon was. It didn’t take her long to find out about the game as we spent our honeymoon in Cleveland at the Ohio Open. My winning the Consolation apparently wasn’t much consolation to her the way she carried on about how much worse Cleveland was than Aruba in January. We never left the Holiday Inn anyway-what difference did it make how cold it was outside, and the breakfast buffet for $7.95 was amazing.

I guess that’s when I began to notice her low tolerance for backgammon. I couldn’t understand why it bothered her so much and she seemed so bored to even be in the room with me while I was playing. I actually began searching the web to see if there is some kind of nervous disorder brought on by the sound of the rolling dice. I did notice that some people have a bad reaction when forced to be in a room full of ugly people, but I didn’t think that was the problem since we often went to K-Mart and she was just fine.

After the honeymoon it was all downhill from there. The more I took her to tournaments the more distant and closed off she became, and there were times I could almost see steam rising from her head after I got knocked out of the main event and got into the chouette.

For those of you who read the blogs, I want to say, for the record, that I honestly believe she was sleep-walking the night she tried to beat me to death with my wooden backgammon board, but asleep or away, I did not appreciate the gesture.

So why am I writing this? I guess I want to try to have some good come out of all of this. If I can warn just one young couple so that they do not have to suffer the pain and hardship that I have gone through, I feel I have done a service to the backgammon community. My advice, and I hope you will always remember this: if you are a backgammon addict, don’t marry a selfish, unreasonable person that won’t let you play every night and every weekend.

By Phil Simborg
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