Bearing Off in Backgammon: Endgame Strategy That Wins More Games

How to bear off in backgammon without giving up the win — wastage, contact endings, when to leave a shot, and why most players lose closer endgames than they should.

Most backgammon games are decided in the middle. But when a game reaches the bear-off and the score is close, the difference between a strong endgame technician and an average player is often two or three pips per game — which over a hundred games is the difference between winning and losing the cumulative match.

Bearing off is more than mechanically removing checkers. There is a craft to it, and learning that craft is one of the highest-leverage things a backgammon player can do.

This post covers the rules of bearing off, wastage (the silent killer of bear-off equity), bear-off-with-contact technique, when leaving a shot is acceptable, and the strange psychology of throwing away a winning position because of a single hit.

The rules, briefly

Once all 15 of your checkers are inside your own home board (points 1 through 6), you may begin removing them. On your turn:

• A roll of N removes one checker from the N-point.
• If no checker sits on point N but you have higher points occupied, you must use the N to move a checker within your home board (advancing it).
• If no checker sits on point N and the N-point is the highest occupied point, you may use N to remove a checker from the highest occupied point — even if that point is lower than N.

Doubles bear off four checkers if you have them. You must use both dice values if both are legal.

For a complete walkthrough of the basic rules, see how to play backgammon.

What "wastage" actually means

Wastage is the term for any pip movement that does not directly remove a checker. If you roll a 6 with no checker on the 6-point and your highest occupied point is the 4-point, you bear off a checker from the 4 — but the 2 pips of difference between what the die rolled and what the checker needed are wasted. Multiplied across the bear-off, wastage is what determines whether your checker count translates into the actual race.

The key insight: a stack of checkers on the 6-point is far less efficient than the same checkers spread across all six points.

Why? Because if all your checkers are on the 6-point, then any roll less than 6 can only advance a checker, not remove one. A 1-2 roll bears off zero checkers from a 6-point stack, while the same roll on a flat distribution (one checker on each point) bears off two.

This is why distributing checkers evenly across your home board during the closeout phase — before the bear-off begins — is important. You are not just preparing to remove checkers; you are setting up the distribution that will determine your bear-off speed.

The 8-checker wastage rule

A useful rule of thumb among club players: leaving more than 8 checkers on the 6-point at the start of the bear-off costs roughly half a roll on average. If you find yourself bearing off with a high stack, expect to be slightly slower than your pip count suggests. Adjust your cube decisions accordingly — see our doubling cube guide for how that affects taking points.

Bearing off with contact

The hardest situation in the endgame is when your opponent still has a checker in your home board — usually on a point like the 1, 2, or 3 — while you are bearing off above them. This is called bearing off with contact, and it requires a different mental model than a clean bear-off.

The two questions you ask each turn:

1. Does this roll force me to leave a shot? A shot is a checker your opponent could hit on their next turn. Direct shots (the opponent's checker is 1–6 pips away) are the dangerous ones; indirect shots (7–12 pips, requiring a combination of both dice) are weaker but still real.

2. Can I avoid the shot by changing how I play the roll? Often you can — at the cost of slowing down by a pip or two. Almost always, taking the slow play to avoid a shot is correct, because being hit while bearing off is catastrophic.

Why being hit is catastrophic

If your opponent hits a checker during your bear-off, that checker goes to the bar — and now has to come back from your opponent's home board, all the way around the board, before you can bear off again. That is a journey of 18+ pips on average, plus the entry-from-bar gauntlet (sometimes blocked entirely, costing whole turns).

Equity-wise, a hit during bear-off can flip a 95% win into a 30% win. The math is brutal. Avoiding shots is worth a lot.

When leaving a shot IS correct

Sometimes it is right to leave a shot anyway. The clearest cases:

• You have to leave one die's worth of shot, but the alternative is leaving a double shot. A 5/6 shot (10 numbers hit) is worse than a single 6 shot (11 numbers, but only one direct).
• Refusing to leave a shot wastes 4+ pips and your opponent's bear-off is already racing yours. If you would lose the race anyway, you may as well take the slim hit chance and the speed.
• Your opponent's home board is open and the cost of being hit is lower. A hit costs less if the entry path is clear.

A useful framing: shot avoidance is risk management, and like all risk management it has a cost. When the cost is too high, you accept the risk.

The bear-off race itself

In a no-contact bear-off race — both players are bearing off cleanly, no checkers in each other's home boards — the math is mostly about pip count and wastage. A few rules to play by:

• Never break a higher point unnecessarily. If you can use a roll without disturbing your 5- and 6-point stacks, do so. Higher points cause more wastage when forced to bear off.
• Spread out before bearing off if you have time. A flat distribution bears off faster than a tall one.
• Don't leave gaps. A gap is an empty inner-board point with checkers above it — gaps create wastage on rolls that would otherwise have used the gap directly.
• Doubles are decisive. A 6-6 in the late bear-off can win an otherwise lost race in one turn. This is also why pip leads of fewer than 8 are surprisingly volatile.

The psychology of bear-off

There is a particular kind of pain that comes from losing a game in the bear-off because you made a single small error six rolls ago — leaving a 4-shot you didn't have to leave, or stacking the 6-point when you could have spread.

Strong players approach the bear-off with the same care they bring to the opening. Every checker placement matters. Every die value matters. The race is decided in tenths of a pip, and the player who pays attention wins more closer-than-they-should-be games.

If you want to drill bear-off positions, the fastest way is to play bot games where the dice are provably fair — meaning your bear-off losses are always the result of your decisions, never anyone tweaking the dice. Verify any roll yourself with a single SHA-256 hash.

Bearing off looks like the easy part. It is the part where careful players quietly take 5–10% additional equity over their lifetime. Worth the attention.