Candidate Moves

For every decision in a match the analyzer didn't just score your move — it ranked a list of candidates. BackgammonDB shows them in the candidate strip below the board (toggle it with ]), and in a fuller all-candidates sheet (C).

Reading a candidate

Each candidate row shows:

• Rank — 1, 2, 3… with rank 1 being the engine's best move.
• The move — e.g. 24/21 for a checker play, or the cube action. Long checker plays can collapse intermediate hops to a single label (a User Settings toggle).
• A tag where it applies — best, played, or best · played when your move was the top choice.
• Cubeful equity — the move's absolute equity.
• Equity delta — how much it gives up against the best move, colored by error severity. The best move's delta is zero.

The fuller cards add a win-probability breakdown — win / gammon / backgammon percentages, and a per-player win-distribution table when the match's players are known.

Preview on the board

The candidate list is wired to the board:

• Hover a candidate to see its move drawn as arrows on the board.
• Click (or press 1–9, B for best, P for played) to lock a candidate so its card stays open; click again to unlock.

The board itself has three display modes for the locked candidate, cycled with D (or set individually with I / A / R):

• Initial — the position before any move.
• Arrows — the move drawn over the starting position.
• Result — the position after the move.

The eval bar

The vertical bar in the board's left margin shows the cubeless game-winning chance of the player at the bottom of the screen. Two things it deliberately doesn't fold in: gammons and backgammons count simply as wins, and the match score carries no weight — it is the chance of winning this game, not the match.

The bar is wired to the same selection as the arrows: it shows the candidate you're hovering or have locked, and otherwise the move actually played. Hover down the candidate list and the bar moves with you, so the cost of an error reads directly in win% rather than equity.

Hover the bar itself (or Tab to it) for the full breakdown — the same win / gammon / backgammon ribbon the candidate cards show, with both players' exact percentages.

Best vs. played

The engine's best move gets its own green overlay with a dashed line so you can always see the top choice next to what you actually did. When your played move was good (its equity loss within the error threshold), the overlay is largely redundant — the Hide best overlay when correct setting suppresses it for any good move, not just when you found the very best, so a single solid arrow stands alone.

Possible moves and the analyzer's depth

The candidate list is only as complete as the analysis in the file. The engine rolls out or evaluates a set of candidates; moves it never considered don't appear, and can't be tagged. That matters for event filters like possible — "possible" means some analyzed move could have done it, not "any legal move". A play that was technically legal but fell outside what the analyzer reviewed won't be counted.