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• Blind Backgammon

Many major backgammon tournaments boast with a special niche dedicated to the women participants, usually called ladies cup, or simply ladies tournament, where the minority of female attendants can compete against each other in an inviting, stress-free environment, or so to speak? Looking at the backgammon tournaments results of the recent years show that the same ladies' tournaments' champions are often ranked high in the results general, gender-indifferent events.

What leads to the inevitable question: ladies backgammon tournaments, what are they good for? Are they really purposed to promote backgammon among women or do they in fact protect their male opponents from the female threat? Do women prefer playing backgammon against their fellow females, or would they rather be treated as equals?

Ladies Tournaments Facts

The ladies tournaments phenomenon is more common in Europe than in the US, where women backgammon players fit in with the boys. The separation between female and regular, i.e. male events is not unique to backgammon and common in other skill games including chess and bridge. While some backgammon players – men and women – trust that these special events would draw a greater number of women players to live backgammon events, others find them insulting and discouraging for women.

Why Not – Woman Backgammon Player Talks

"It felt so nice beating all the Greek guys… the fact that backgammon is indeed a masculine game is even more intriguing, because I become way more competitive when playing vs. males", said Filomila Karantzali of Greece, an international backgammon star on the rise, after winning her first Greek Backgammon Federation monthly tourney in 2008.

Since then, she had participated in two Nordic Open events and to form a firm opinion against women's segregation in backgammon tournaments, which in her opinion tend to intensify males' degrading estimation of their female colleagues skill level "since females are being treated like something different, as if not being capable and equally strong to male players."