Quirky Backgammon Game

I was playing a match to 5 points against the computer earlier today and ran into an interesting board position. I had 11 of my checkers back in my opponent's home board, and had made my own 5 and 3 points. I was getting the program (gnubg) to tell me the optimal move, and it said the best thing to do was to play off the 5 and 3 points giving myself 4 blots in my home base with 1 enemy checker on the bar.

It didn't make a lot of sense, but I went with it, and eventually figured out what the plan was. (I ended up winning the game despite being down 230 pips at one point.) 2 points, even in my home board, are useless on their own. Even when I managed to get 3 of his checkers hit and had the rest of his guys stacked on his 4 and 5 points, there was no way I was going to get enough of my checkers forward to build a wall with those points. I had to take a long term approach to the game, and start by building a wall far back where I could easily get new guys. I had to still leave enough guys in his base to keep him stuck on 2 or 3 points (enabling easy reentry when I got hit) so I needed as many guys back as possible. Through rolling of doubles he did eventually save 2 of his 3 lost guys but I managed to build a wall back far enough to contain the last one. Then it was a simple matter of slowly moving the wall forward while he was stuck unable to move any guys.