Nicholas Lee Ballard was born in 1958 in Evanston, Illinois. Known as Nack Ballard, from 1999 and 2005 he was the number one Giant of Backgammon.
On the international backgammon scene the American player managed to obtain very impressive performances. In 1982 he won the American Backgammon Championship. Ballard finished victorious in the Pro Am in 2001, 2003 and 2004. Nowadays the Pro Am is called the American Doubles Championship. In the million-dollar backgammon tournament which was organized in January 2007 by Michael Strato, Nack Ballard from the 25 Giants that were in the competition was the only one who reached the semi-finals of the great competition. The tournament which offered as a first place prize more than 600,000 dollars took place at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas.

In recent years he has played just in a couple of tournaments and the reason for this is because he is writing a series of backgammon books. With Paul Weaver as an co-author his book are focused on how to play the first three rolls in backgammon. However this game is not the only that he enjoys to play. Occasionally he also has fun with other games such as chess, scrabble and go and many others.