Masayuki Mochizuki - Japan
Masayuki Mochizuki, born January 9, 1979 in Tokyo, Japan goes by the nickname of “Mochy” and is a member of the Japanese Backgammon League who has played professionally on the international circuit for more than decade. In 2009, Mochy has won the Monte Carlo Backgammon World Championship.
Several years ago, Mochy decided to get out to as many live events as possible and is actually the most-travelled of Japanese players. He says his favourite venue is the annual Barriere event at Enghein-les-Bains near Paris, France. He is currently attending many of the PartoucheGammon Tour and World Series of Backgammon events, and also competed in the Atlantis Million event in January of 2007.
Amongst many other money wins along the way, the young bachelor was the Champion at the 2003 Las Vegas Open, the 2005 Bristol "Wide" Open and the 2006 Belgian Open. He also won the Second Consolation of the 2006 World Backgammon Championship in Monte Carlo, three years before he was awarded world champion.
Masayuki trains himself by dedicating a lot of time to studying positions from his matches played live at tournaments as well as on backgammon servers such as Play65, where he also serves as an advisor in detecting backgammon bots. Mochy has also read practically all of the most important books on the strategy of the game.
About two years ago, Mochizuki said that one of his goals in life was to have the lowest Snowie error rate amongst human players in the world. In one of the past Easters, at the huge 20th PartoucheGammon Nordic Open Backgammon Championship in Denmark, he won first prize for in a side competition actually called “Lowest Error Rate” performing at 1.9 according to the Snowie program. It can now be said that Mochy has achieved his goal since so many Danes play backgammon and are notorious for having very low error rates, as well as because many other top international players attended the Nordic Open.
Mochy says he would like to someday see an international team tournament in which, not just a few, but all of the world's backgammon-playing countries participate.
