This year, Prince Alexis Obolensky was elected to the American Backgammon Hall of Fame. (I always thought he should have been elected with the first class of inductees, but better late than never.) For those who aren’t familiar with Oby or his accomplishments, here’s a brief biographical sketch.
Prince Alexis Obolensky. Born 1915. Died 1986, age 71.
Obolensky’s family was of Russian origin but fled to France after the Bolshevik revolution. He moved to the U.S.A. in the 1920s with his parents and graduated from the University of Virginia in the 1930s. For most of his life he divided his time between homes in New York City and Palm Beach. His occupation was a real estate broker in the Palm Beach area. His passion was backgammon.
Obolensky knew most of the backgammon players at the exclusive men’s clubs in New York, Florida, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In 1963 he and a friend, Bindy Banker, a Wall Street stockbroker, decided to hold a tournament at the Lucaya Beach Hotel on Grand Bahama Island and invite his friends from the various clubs. The hotel had just opened and was eager for an event to advertise its new casino, so the tournament seemed a natural fit.
Backgammon had a huge surge of popularity in the 1920s and 1930s but travel then was slow and very expensive, so any tournaments of that era were local affairs. By the 1960s air travel was commonplace and relatively cheap. Obolensky realized that this would permit something like an international backgammon tournament to be staged and he was just the man to put it together and pull it off.
He was certain enough of its success that he called a friend at Sports Illustrated and convinced him to send one of their staff reporters, Edwin Shrake, along with a photographer, to cover the tournament. He also had the prescience to hire a bookmaker, Jelly Wehby, to make book on the various players.
Wenby was a short, shrewd, jolly craps shooter who dressed all in green and was described as looking like a ‘walking avocado salad’. While he didn’t know much about backgammon, he was open to good advice from the cognoscenti and managed to run a serviceable book while turning a profit.
A total of 48 players entered, paying a modest entry fee. (Jacoby and Crawford’s The Backgammon Book claims only 32 players entered, but that was written six years after the event. I’ll go with the total listed in the Sports Illustrated article, written almost contemporaneously with the tournament itself.) Obolensky also decided to borrow a feature from golf tournaments – he ran an auction which raised another $15,000. So Obolensky hit a trifecta on his first go – first International Backgammon Tournament, first backgammon auction, and first tournament with a fixed odds book.
While most of the 48 players came from Obolensky’s crowd of wealthy, socially-connected high rollers, Obolensky scored another coup by inviting Nick Sergeant. Sergeant was born Nassim Segaloff in Bulgaria in 1896, and bounced around Europe for a while before finally changing his name and settling in New York in the 1940s. In New York he advertised himself as ‘the world’s best backgammon player’, and made a living playing for modest stakes around the city. Unfortunately for Sergeant, his unique combination of eccentricity and obnoxiousness kept him from the high-stakes games in ritzy clubs. You had to be a little careful playing Sergeant, as he had a real temper. Lewis Deyong likes to recount a story of Sergeant losing a big cube and responding by taking a bite out of his opponent’s hand!
Sergeant may well have been the best player of his day. No one really knew, but his presence added another level of interest for the players. Sergeant eventually made it to the semi-finals after beating Johnny Crawford (who would win the tournament the next year) and Teddy Bassett, another strong player of the time. In the semis, however, he was upset by Porter Ijams, one of the young stars of New York’s Racquet and Tennis Club. Ijams in turn lost 25-20 in the finals to Charlie Wacker of Chicago.
The tournament was viewed as a great success by the participants, all of whom agreed they had had a fine time. More important, the hotel was happy, and Obolensky started organizing the second edition of the tournament before the first had even finished. In 1965 the tournament got underway again, this time with 64 players. Johnny Crawford, a close friend of Oswald Jacoby and one of the top bridge and backgammon players of the day, beat Judd Streicher of New York in the finals. Jacoby himself won the 3rd and 4th editions of the tournament in 1966 and 1967, and the 1967 event hit 128 players. Meanwhile other events were beginning in New York, Las Vegas, and London.
Obolensky was delighted with the progress backgammon had made in just a few years, but he realized that to break through and reach a larger number of players he needed much more publicity, and the key to free publicity was getting large numbers of celebrities playing. Celebrities meant Hollywood and sports, so he set off for Los Angeles. There he opened Oby’s, a restaurant, bar, and backgammon parlor, and managed to get plenty of A-list and B-list folks playing the game. Pretty soon you could go to a tournament and sit across from Lucille Ball, John Wayne, Jim Brown, or Jimmy Connors.
Obolensky hit the jackpot, however, when he turned Hugh Hefner on to backgammon. Hefner loved the game and could play 72 hours at a stretch at the Playboy Mansion, fueled by Pepsi and a few other substances. Hefner meant stories and photo spreads in Playboy, which in turn led to stories in Time, Newsweek, Harper’s, and plenty of newspapers. Tournaments were now exploding throughout Europe and Mexico, some organized by Obolensky, others by enthusiastic locals.
In 1969 Obolensky wrote the first book on backgammon in 28 years, called Backgammon: The Action Game. It was a simple book, much like those of the 1920s and 1930s, with some recommendations for opening moves, some sample games, and a lot of history about backgammon-like games dating back to the Egyptians and Sumerians. A year later Jacoby and Crawford followed with their classic The Backgammon Book, and within a few years there were dozens of titles on the bookshelves.
At about the same time Obolensky started the World Backgammon Club in New York, a formal organization for running international tournaments. The club also published Backgammon News, a small newsletter with tournament results, quizzes, and ads.
By 1977 Obolensky began to wind down his participation and organizational activities. He may have felt he had achieved his objectives, which he certainly had. Ill heath may also have played a role. He died in New York in 1986 at the relatively young age of 71.
Obolensky was almost single-handedly responsible for the backgammon boom of the 1970s and 1980s, which in turn led to the game as we know it today. Would backgammon have become popular without him? It’s an open question that can’t be answered. It might have happened on a much slower scale, or it might never have happened, and backgammon would have remained an obscure gambling game played in a few exclusive clubs. Thanks, Oby, and welcome to the Backgammon Hall of Fame.
