Elements of chance can both make a game more accessible to beginners and raise the skill ceiling fro pros at the same time. It's more accessible, because a begi

Elements of chance can both make a game more accessible to beginners and raise the skill ceiling fro pros at the same time. It's more accessible, because a beginner player might still get lucky and win through pure chance. But it also raises the skill ceiling, because you need to work with probability on top of strategy. You might sometimes make the right move and still lose. And you might sometimes make the wrong move and still win. But that also makes it more challenging to improve above a certain level, since you need a deeper analysis than 'did I win?' to understand what you did right and wrong. It does mean that unlike chess, where the superior player will likely win 100/100 matches, a superior backgammon player might only win 60-70 games out of 100. Learning to combine strategy and probability is valuable, and arguably maybe even more applicable to the real world than the pure strategy of chess.