Question about take points

Your take is a blunder because you are ignoring gammons. Takepoint is actually a bit more complicated than the 25% figure you read somewhere.

thanks for your answer. but how do i decide if it's a take or not, if i know the take point is 25%?

It is rather a complicated process, especially for someone who has little or no experience. In theory, your takepoint equals to Dead_Takepoint - Cube_Vig + GV1*Gammons - GV2*Gammons. Your Dead_Takepoint is 27.87 percent at this score, This assumes you never win gammons, never lose gammons and never redouble. Cube_Vig varies from position to position and typically about 2-2.5 percent. This is, suposedly, someone said takepoint is 25%. In reality, a better estimate is 25.4% but it is a minor thing. Gammon Value when the cube is on 4 is 0.231. So, 0.231*(17.8-3.5) = 3.3. This says add 3.3 percent to your dead takepoint and subtract cube vig. Because in some of the games you will redouble to 8 and make gammons worthless, you can further reduce the 3.3% number. How often will this happen? Well, your opponent has 25% to go to take him from 75% to 100%. You have 60% to go from 25% to 85%, when opponent will have to pass a redouble. So, you are about 30% to redouble. So, it should be 3.3*(1-0.3)= 2.3. So, the takepoint in this position adjusted for cube vig and gammons is 25.4+2.3=27.7.

In this position I would start with the race 95-107. If this was a straight race, you would win about 23% of the time. Now, the next question you want to ask is who benefits from the contact (and by how much). To me it is not immediately clear. Opponent can pick and pass or sometimes even point on head but his position is inflexible and it easy to imagine he leaves a game winning shot. Maybe, I would figure out contact benefits the taker slightly, but unlikely it benefits him enough to swing from 23% to 27.7% take territory calculated in the post above.

thank you very much for your explanation, and for the effort calculating all that. but i could never do all this over the board. i was hoping learning all the take points for different match scores would help me make better cube decisions, but it seems that alone won't help all that much. i'm at a loss now how to get better at cubing :-(

You don't need to/have to calculate all that OTB. You should memorize some numbers and/or have a good idea of what they should be equal to. Many top players don't even do that and just make decisions based on their feeling.

Mostly what you want to do is (1) learn what typical doubles/takes/passes look like for certain game types (blitz, backgames, running games, etc.) at 0-0 in a long match or for money play, and then (2) learn how to adjust for match score. But no, it's not easy.

Also helpful to memorize what the take points are for a 5-point match when the cube is going to dead after taking (or taking followed by an automatic recube.) Learning exact take points when the cube is going to still be live after taking is not particularly useful IMO. But knowing stuff like "I should pass a little more readily at this score than for money" is often key.