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* The "two players, one is light and one is dark" quote could refer to concept of Good & Evil, as that is the traditional archetypical portrayal of those forces.
* Walt uses his special powers to win the game by influencing the roll of the dice, either consciously or subconsciously.
* This may be a reference to the Kurt Vonnegut short story entitled, "The Barnhouse Effect" [1]. This story involves a professor that discovers how to manipulate traditionally chance-related events such as dice rolls using his thoughts. In a parallel to Einstein's concern over indirectly beginning the age of nuclear warfare, Barnhouse goes into hiding (from the U.S. military who want to use him as a weapon) while secretly teaching a protoge (the narrator of the story) the technique.
* The two small pieces, light and dark, represent the two children among the main survivors, Walt and Aaron, one of whom is black and one of whom is white, and those two children will be used by opposing sides as pawns in a climactic struggle.
* A game of backgammon is essentially won by dealing with events effectively; to succeed, a player must make the best of what moves are made available to them by a random throw of the dice. In season one (where backgammon is especially prevalent), the focus is very much on a similar theme, but on a much larger scale; survival on the island is largely down to making the best of new, strange, and fluid situations.
* Skilled players choose from the available moves, as dictated by the dice roll, with several factors in mind. One of the most important concepts in backgammon tactics is to maximize the number of probable future good moves for yourself while minimizing those of your opponent. Despite a player's skill, however, it is possible that the random throws of the dice will make it impossible for the better player to win. For example, Walt is able to beat Hurley despite Hurley's greater experience in the game - since Walt always gets exactly the roll he needs "to move ahead", it does not matter how skilled Hurley is at making good moves improbable for Walt.
* Checkers in the backgammon game and crash survivors have analagous goals: to get off the board or island, respectively. There are numerous situations that prevent backgammon checkers from leaving the board which may be analagous to the problem of leaving the island:
* the pieces must first move to the "home board"
* once on the home board the right number must be rolled to move off
* the way to the home board may be blocked by opposing pieces
* if any checkers have been "bumped" by the opposing side, no checkers may move or leave the board until the bumped checker returns.
* Some other parallels:
* Two or more pieces standing on the same point cannot be bumped: "Live Together, Die Alone, Part 1"
* Walt's innate ability to always "get the roll he needs to move ahead" in the game is therefore quite interesting. Have all the correct but improbable events happened in order to enable he and his father to leave the island? When Jacob touched Jack, John, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley and Sayid he was selecting some of his players/checkers for the game of backgammon he and his nemesis are playing. If this is the case then he may be able to become them and manipulate their actions when it is his turn in the game. When we saw Widmore and Ben saying you know I cannot kill you because I cannot change the rules, it wasn't Ben and Widmore but Jacob and his nemesis assuming their forms at one particular point in that game of backgammon that we were seeing.
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