Both, and that is exactly what makes it great. The dice give every game a jolt of chance, so a beginner can occasionally beat an expert, but over a series of games the better player wins almost every time. Backgammon is a game of skill with a luck engine: the luck keeps it exciting, the skill decides who comes out ahead. Here is precisely where each one lives.
Luck enters in one place: the roll of the two dice each turn. You can't control what you roll, and a single unlucky sequence can lose a game you "should" have won. This is real, and it is the reason a single game is a poor measure of who is better. It is also the reason backgammon never gets stale: no two games unfold the same way.
Skill enters everywhere else, and there is far more of it than newcomers realize. With the same roll, two players will often choose very different moves, and one of those moves is measurably better. Skill shows up in:
The doubling cube lets you raise the stakes when you are ahead and decide whether to accept when your opponent raises them. Used well, it lets a skilled player win more when they are winning and lose less when they are losing. Used poorly, it hands away points by the handful. Two players of equal checker skill but unequal cube skill are not close: cube decisions alone separate strong players from average ones, and they are pure judgment, with no dice involved at all. If you want to get better at backgammon fast, learning the cube is the highest-leverage thing you can do.
The math is simple: variance shrinks as the sample grows. Over one game, luck can dominate. Over a multi-point match, the better player's edge starts to show. Over a season of matches, skill is overwhelming, the same way a strong poker player loses individual hands but finishes ahead over thousands of them. This is why serious backgammon is played in matches to a target score rather than single games, and why a rating built from many matches is a fair measure of how good you actually are.
Two tools make skill visible. The first is a rating earned across many ranked matches, which places you against the field. The second is a computer analysis called a Performance Rating (PR): after a game, a backgammon engine compares every move you made to the best available play and reports how close you came, on average. A lower PR means stronger play, and unlike a single result, it can't be explained away by the dice. On Backgammon Battles every completed match is analyzed move by move and feeds a transparent ranking, so your skill, not your luck, is what shows.
Play ranked matches against real opponents, get every game graded by the computer, and climb a world ranking that measures skill, not luck. Free to play.
Play backgammon freeBoth, but skill dominates over a series of games. The dice add luck to any single game, while checker-play and cube decisions decide who wins consistently. The more you play, the more the luck averages out and the stronger player wins.
Because stronger players beat weaker players reliably over time. They make better moves with the same dice and use the doubling cube far more effectively, and those edges compound across many games.
Play longer matches and more of them: variance from the dice shrinks as the sample grows. Using the doubling cube well also lets a skilled player capture more from good positions and limit the damage in bad ones.
Related: is online backgammon rigged? →
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