Study Mode

Study turns your own positions into flashcards. You pick a deck — a preset, one of your saved presets, a set of annotated positions, or a past session — set how many questions you want, and BackgammonDB deals them out one at a time as a spoiler-free quiz.

You answer, you get graded, and a running history remembers what you've seen so you can keep drilling the ones you get wrong. Once you've mastered a position, it won't reappear.

It's built on the same engine as the Positions Browser: every question is one of your decisions, pulled from your analyzed matches.

Starting a session

The setup page is split in two: choose a deck on the left, set up and launch it on the right.

Continue studying — across the top sit pills for the decks you've already drilled, each showing how you're doing: your all-time score, the total questions answered, and your last session's result. The score is colored — green when you're on top of it, amber when it's shaky, red when it needs work — so a glance tells you where to put your time. Pick one to carry on.

Start a new study — at the top, under Your annotated positions, sit always-visible pills built from your own markings: Starred, Tagged, and Commented, plus one pill for each custom tag you've created — so any set of positions you've flagged is one click away. Below those are quick-start pills for common drills (checker errors, opening-roll mistakes, and so on), then your own saved presets, always in view. Hit More decks to expand the full set of presets, grouped into sections.

Session options — pick any deck and the right-hand panel sets it up:

• Questions — 5, 10, 25, or 50.
• Quiz options — how the candidate moves are picked for each question:
  • Spread of 5 (default) — a deliberate mix across the quality range, so the options are genuinely different (see Answering a question).
  • Top 5 — the five best candidate moves.
  • Top 4 + played — the four best plus the move you actually played.
  • All moves — every candidate the engine looked at.
• Positions — which slice of the deck to draw from: Mix (everything, the default), New only (positions you've never been quizzed on), or Wrong only (positions you've gotten wrong before).
• Exclude mastered — a switch (on by default) that skips positions you've already nailed (see Mastering a position), keeping your drills focused on what you still get wrong.

If you've studied this deck before, sit its past sessions. Click any to reopen its scorecard, or retake, resume, or delete it.

Answering a question

Each card shows the board with the analysis hidden. You get a short list of candidate moves to choose from, picked according to your Choices option. By default that's a spread: the best move, the move actually played, and a representative across the quality range (a good alternative, a doubtful one, an error, a blunder) — so you're choosing between genuinely different ideas, not four moves that look almost the same.

Pick a move and hit Submit. Now the position opens up to reveals the eval. A near-best move counts as correct. You don't have to find the single top play every time; anything the engine rates as a good move is graded right, so close-but-not-perfect answers aren't punished.

From here you can:

• View full analysis — open the complete candidate list and eval, fully interactive, right there on the card. Your pick and the move actually played are both labelled.
• Mark as mastered — flag a correct answer as done so it drops out of future sessions.
• Next question — move on.

Mastering a position

A position becomes mastered once you answer it correctly three times in a row. You can also master (or un-master) one by hand from the verdict button or the end-of-session summary. Mastered positions are skipped while Exclude mastered is on.

The summary, and going again

Finish a session and you get a scorecard: your score, total equity lost from your choices, and every question rated by how your answer came out. You can open each position in match review.

There are a few ways to keep going:

• Retake — the exact same questions again. (From a deck's past-sessions list.)
• Retake wrong — just the ones you missed. (Same place.)
• Resume — pick an abandoned session back up where you left off. (Same place.)
• Continue — a fresh batch from the same deck. This is the one to use for ongoing practice: it pulls new questions and mixes in positions you've gotten wrong before, so you keep meeting fresh material instead of grinding the same handful forever. It's the main button on the right whenever you select a deck you've studied, and it uses whatever question count and filters you've set in the options panel.