Jonathan Hakimi Joins Ed Hall on the Over the Board Podcast

If you want to know what is happening in backgammon, Over the Board is where you go to hear it from the people making it happen. Host Ed Hall has spent the last two years interviewing the game’s most accomplished players and influential figures: Super Grandmaster Dirk Schiemann, Grandmaster Hideaki Ueda, World Backgammon Federation President Bernhard Mayr, author and YouTube educator Alex Eshaghian, and the organizers behind tournaments and clubs from New York to Sydney to Johannesburg. Episodes cover everything from high-level strategy and the history of the first million-dollar tournament to the rise of new backgammon communities around the world.

After hearing the buzz about Backgammon Cash in the backgammon community, Ed invited co-founder Jonathan Hakimi onto episode 38 to talk about it.

Much of the conversation is about what it takes to run real-money backgammon properly. Jonathan walks through what has to be true before players will trust a platform with their money: dice that are provably random, matches that are monitored for fair play, and rules that handle every outcome the board can produce. That includes the partnership with 5POINT, the backgammon integrity service that monitors Backgammon Cash matches for engine assistance and other forms of cheating, so that the players at the top of the leaderboard got there on skill alone.

Ed and Jonathan also get into how the platform has changed since launch. Backgammon Cash started with head-to-head money matches, and since then the team has added gammon games, real-money tournaments, and a series of features driven directly by what players asked for. The pattern has been consistent: players tell the team what serious backgammon needs, and the team builds it.

That only scratches the surface. Hear where Jonathan thinks real-money backgammon is headed, what the team is building next, and everything else he and Ed got into in the full episode below.