The Backgammon Chronicles: A Pro's Adventures on Tour is a lush, two-volume, full-color cornucopia of gambling stories, character sketches, historical essays and tournament drama that takes the reader on an insider's odyssey through backgammon's last whirlwind decade--with its author, one of the game's elite competitors, as guide. Introducing you to the game's stars even as he narrates his clashes with them in a score of exotic venues, Robert Wachtel frames the action against an overview of the events and crises that have defined contemporary backgammon: the advent of the artificial-intelligence programs and their virtual extinction of the game's traditional role as a gambling recreation; the ecstatic birth and untimely death of online play; the burst of investment and enthusiasm brought to the game by the poker boom; and current trends: the outreach of Western backgammon culture back towards the game's birthplace, the Middle East; and the efforts of the federations of the major nations to establish a viable global community. Volume 1 begins in 2008, when the formulas that had fueled a worldwide poker boom were being tested in Europe and the Middle East on the internationally more popular and beloved game of backgammon. The scene was intoxicating: games for every stake, from pennies to thousands of dollars, were available 24/7 online, with live tournaments held year-round in lavish resorts, their prize pools fortified by great dollops of money added by casinos, hotels, and assorted gambling platforms. Entrepreneurs--their eyes starry with visions of the sort of high-stakes tours, galas, books, films and TV series that had reaped easy profits for media and gaming concerns in promoting poker--were taking meetings and arranging financing. The author is both a peer and a friend of backgammon's best and brightest. The reader will meet those brilliant, quirky characters up close in these pages as Robert faces off against them in tournament play and engages them in a special entertainment of his own device, dubbed by ex-world #1 Mike Natanzon (trade name: Falafel) "The Chronicles." Chronicles are histories; and so these volumes are aptly named, for they are indeed episodes of the author's backgammon adventures. But the title has a double meaning: the books are chronicles in Falafel's sense as well, for the special entertainment mentioned above figures prominently in many of their tales. At a major tournament the author would gather together as many top players as possible and ask them to solve backgammon dilemmas he'd encountered over the board--and often gotten wrong. The format always aroused the experts' competitive instincts, provoking them to argue, bluster, and challenge one another as they backed their opinions with hefty side bets. A lover of the game could hardly hope for a more exciting experience than watching these sparks fly. This volume is a travelog as well, for the tournament trail the players followed was well worth photographing: Stockholm; Prague; Copenhagen; Paris; Velden (Austria); Montreux (Switzerland); Oulu (Finland); Oslo; Majorca; North Cyprus; and finally as the volume ends, to a freezing outdoor tournament at an altitude of almost 3000 meters in the French Alps amidst the peaks overlooking the ski village of Meribel

This volume rejoins the backgammon epic in mid-2011, just as its carnival years were winding down. The projects of online money backgammon and television series on the poker model were failing; and with their demise a new landscape came in to view: drawn in deeper hues, it revealed a backgammon geography with centers of power in Japan, Denmark, Turkey and the United States and a re-imagination of the game itself--from its traditional role as a gambling recreation to that of a true mind sport--with a player's excellence no longer judged by his "earn" but by the rating assigned him by artificial-intelligence programs ("bots") that were stronger than any human. A hustler no longer, the hero of the second decade of the 21st century emerged as a dedicated statistical scientist, training with the same AI that would judge him in his noble quest for backgammon truth. This fresh paradigm led to the staging of several exceptional events, the most eminent of which was an annual team match that pitted Denmark against "the rest of the world." This might sound like an unfair contest, but it was hardly so, for that small Scandinavian nation was undoubtedly (for reasons carefully explained in Chronicles) by far the world's strongest. The author made the World team four times, in 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2015, and did his best to record not only the decisions that were eventually made by the teams but also the passionate debates that led to them. Disciples of the analysis programs that these masters of the game may have been, they were far from robotic themselves--and this volume faithfully reproduces some of the fascinating ground-zero interplay, under terrific pressure, of visceral emotion and brilliant intelligence. To further emphasize the players' humanity: when at last they could not agree with one another, they frequently relieved the tension with bets The author followed the tour as it continued with new sponsors and destinations. His travels took him to Gibraltar, the legendary British fortress at the southern tip of Spain that has lately become a gaming and offshore banking haven; to the exotic Black-Sea republic of Georgia, where, as in most Middle-Eastern countries, backgammon is the national game, played by everyone--young, old, rich, poor, male and female; and to North Cyprus, which nowadays is to nearby Islamic lands something like what Cuba used to be to the USA: an offshore refuge for gamblers whose preferred recreations are prohibited at home. And the island's casinos treat their customers as Vegas did theirs 40 years ago: with cheap rooms, 24-hour buffets, and open bars where the free alcohol never stops flowing. The weather is fine, so it's no surprise that the turnout for Cyprus is always huge. Full disclosure: though contrary to the author's principles, this volume contains a baklava food-porn photo (there are about 15 varieties on offer every day, all day long).

Birds Without Wings traces the fortunes of one small community in southwest Turkey (Anatolia) in the early part of the last century—a quirky community in which Christian and Muslim lives and traditions have co-existed peacefully over the centuries and where friendship, even love, has transcended religious differences. But with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of the Great War, the sweep of history has a cataclysmic effect on this peaceful place: The great love of Philothei, a Christian girl of legendary beauty, and Ibrahim, a Muslim shepherd who courts her from near infancy, culminates in tragedy and madness; Two inseparable childhood friends who grow up playing in the hills above the town suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of the bloody struggle; and Rustem Bey, a wealthy landlord, who has an enchanting mistress who is not what she seems. Far away from these small lives, a man of destiny who will come to be known as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is emerging to create a country from the ruins of an empire. Victory at Gallipoli fails to save the Ottomans from ultimate defeat and, as a new conflict arises, Muslims and Christians struggle to survive, let alone understand, their part in the great tragedy that will reshape the whole region forever.