Team tourneys as opposed to team matches

[jimcloh]

I was considering how to have a team tourney in the Tourney section of BBO as opposed to in the Team Match area. As it seem that players or pairs are seeded into tourney slot randomly, the best way I can think of doing it would be to have (40 or so) volunteers populate a tourney, and not bid. Then the real players would sign on as substitutes, and replace the volunteers according to a list communicated to the TD, (at a table as the Total Points Club does). The tourney itself would just be a multi-board one round affair. The only real hard part would be to get the volunteers not to bid, but a solution that may be possible would be for BBO to authorize a TD to have multiple presences so the TD could enter alter egos into the tourney and substitute them out.

[Al_U_Card]

Are there any plans to insitute Swiss type tourneys for teams?

[inquiry]

Are there any plans to insitute Swiss type tourneys for teams?

The question of SWISS TEAM events is a reoccuring issue here.

 

Uday suggested on September 9th 2005 the "we will implement swiss teams someday" and promised help with the "find a game" to include "find a team game".

 

See his post in the following link. Team games, KO's and Swiss (actually that thread was started by you Al_Card so you probably remember the reply).

 

The desire to start swiss (or bam or any other TEAM tournaments) go back much further. For instance, Willem asked about Team Tournaments in May of 2004. Where uday's reply was

 

"I don't think it would be too difficult to program, no more so than, say, any other new movement.

 

I don't think there is much interest in this sort of movement. Is there ? "

 

After which a few people (too bad TONS of us didn't reply) said yes, PLEASE we are very interested in the TEAM GAMES.

 

If you want a record of the discussion. Uday asked about private clubs, pay tournaments (before they exist), and other issues back in October or 2003. There were problems with clocked and unclocked movements and he asked ....

 

how important do you think cleaning up the clocked/unclocked movements is, as opposed to adding new movements

 

- team games (presumably swiss to start with, but maybe KO)

- Qualifying events ( Some percentage of the field is discarded after each XX boards )

 

To which I replied (click to see link): "Top priority... TEAM GAME board a match or IMPs with large fields. This is very important I would think. Followed by fixing the movement, followed by qualifying events. Of course, this is my personnal preference. " and only DrTodd an Mink pipped in that team tournaments would be a good idea. I suspect this is where uday got the idea (see earlier) that there was little interest in the team tournament idea (for the record, no one suggesting fixing any of the problems uday mentioned was a higher priority... in 2003 we had very few posters here.

 

I thought then, and I think now, TEAM TOURNAMENTS would be a great idea. I have made one change to my thinking however. Since TEAM GAMES are free, I am leaning toward TEAM TOURNAMENTS to be a premium service with some small fee collected from the teams going to BBO. 10 cents a player or perhaps more. Or they could be a feature of the pay organizations. This way, TEAM players could still arrange pickup team games, or knockouts or round robins events using non-BBO sites to get organized and play in the TEAM GAME room for free. While BBO team tournaments could be a money maker for BBO (and incentive to generate the movement codes). (Did you know currently that there are hundreds of thousands of team game hands played each quarter on the BBO)?

[hrothgar]

I thought then, and I think now, TEAM TOURNAMENTS would be a great idea. I have made one change to my thinking however. Since TEAM GAMES are free, I am leaning toward TEAM TOURNAMENTS to be a premium service with some small fee collected from the teams going to BBO. 10 cents a player or perhaps more. Or they could be a feature of the pay organizations. This way, TEAM players could  still arrange knockouts or round robins using non-BBO sites to get organized, and BBO team tournaments could be a money maker for BBO (and incentive to generate the movement codes). (Did you know currently that there are hundreds of thousands of team game hands played each quarter on the BBO)?

Couple comments here:

 

1. As I understand matters, BBO is planning a major re-vamp of its architecture. Historically, Fred and Uday do a really great job pushing out new features. However, I expect that there is going to be a long period where we are "stuck" with the status quo. (Personally, I'd be relectant to push significant new functionality onto code base that was about to get deprecated)

 

2. Your suggestion that BBO charge for any / all team events represents a very significant change in business model. From my perspective, its not a change that I like very much. You seem to be assuming that the functionality that you requested hasn't been added because Fred/Uday don't believe that its worth their while to do so. However, we've seen a LOT of new features get released during this same period. I expect that the root cause is simple that other functionality (Full Dislosure, etc) was viewed as more important.

 

3. I wouldn't prioritize team movements that heavily... Board a Match isn't a particularly popular style of play. I don't think that it would be all that popular. Equally significant, "long" events don't seem to do all that well in the online world. Swiss teams events often last an entire day, if not longer. I'd expect a never ending series of substitutes and team withdrawls.

 

Your milage may vary

[inquiry]

I thought then, and I think now, TEAM TOURNAMENTS would be a great idea. I have made one change to my thinking however. Since TEAM GAMES are free, I am leaning toward TEAM TOURNAMENTS to be a premium service with some small fee collected from the teams going to BBO. 10 cents a player or perhaps more. Or they could be a feature of the pay organizations. This way, TEAM players could  still arrange knockouts or round robins using non-BBO sites to get organized, and BBO team tournaments could be a money maker for BBO (and incentive to generate the movement codes). (Did you know currently that there are hundreds of thousands of team game hands played each quarter on the BBO)?

Couple comments here:

 

1. As I understand matters, BBO is planning a major re-vamp of its architecture. Historically, Fred and Uday do a really great job pushing out new features. However, I expect that there is going to be a long period where we are "stuck" with the status quo. (Personally, I'd be relectant to push significant new functionality onto code base that was about to get deprecated)

 

2. Your suggestion that BBO charge for any / all team events represents a very significant change in business model. From my perspective, its not a change that I like very much. You seem to be assuming that the functionality that you requested hasn't been added because Fred/Uday don't believe that its worth their while to do so. However, we've seen a LOT of new features get released during this same period. I expect that the root cause is simple that other functionality (Full Dislosure, etc) was viewed as more important.

 

From my perspective, I wouldn't prioritize team movements that heavily...

 

Board a Match isn't a particularly popular style of play. I don't think that it would be all that popular. Equally significant, "long" events don't seem to do all that well in the online world. Swiss teams events often last an entire day, if not longer. I'd expect a never ending series of substitutes and team withdrawls.

 

Your milage may vary

I don't think they should charge for ALL TEAM events. The current TEAM GAME room would remain unchanged... and free. They should charge for the premium service of TEAM TOURNAMENTS, where you enter your team and are automatically pitted against three to however many other teams. You don' thave to find your opponents or go through the normal hassles of setting up a team event. Just register and start on time.

 

The TEAM game function as exist now should continue. No one would be forced to play in a TEAM event. Further, I suggested a very modest fee for the team event. 10 cents a player is 1/10th the normal tournament fee. I am sure at least one team member could afford the 40 cents to pay for the entire team.

 

Replacing a TEAM in a team event (needing 4 players) would be quite a hassle I think. Of course, one player or one pair, might be not too different from the way it is today, but replacing an entire team would be problematic. The fee-structure would be used to help keep the game at least someone more serious (As serious as 40 cents can be).

 

As far as revamping the BBO, I think any code written to set up and run team tournaments could be carried over to any potential new site. After all, what is needed is the algorithm for movement and data management. And as uday said (quoted above), he doesn't think the movement would be no harder tha any other movement to program. I guess waht goes unsaid is maybe movements are very hard to program as we have no howell movement (Still something I really think we need for small tourmament) and no team movements.

[uday]

There is no chance that we'll suddenly charge for team events, or team tourneys, etc.

 

We go thru slow periods of development for many reasons. Sometimes bec. FG is away. Sometimes bec. FG+UI together are doing other things, Money Bridge, or FD, or what not.

 

We're spending cycles on the whole re-architecture thing. So far, it has mostly been a waste of cycles, if you ask me :) We'll come to some conclusions at some point but there are no "good" options for us. But that's for another thread.

 

When I have spare cycles, I push for my personal "next project" (fully automated individuals). But other people have considerable say over what I actually get to do. FG will probably want us to find some way to have the human in MB events always declare.

 

The find-a-random-team-game function in help-me-find-a-game is one of the least used functions on BBO. "Find player online" has it beat, but it is close :)

 

An interested party could run a swiss team event by taking signups by hand, for instance, and constructing the matches and tracking the scores. PITA, no doubt, but doable. If someone wants to try, let me know and i'll bump up that persons TD rights to allow him to create XX simultaneous team games.

 

The ACBL-in-memphis is not clear about whether we'll be able to issue MasterPoints for swiss teams. Our sanction is a club sanction, and swiss teams are not usually run at the club level. There are no standardized MP scales for club-level swiss teams, as I understand it. Being allowed to issue MPs would probably make someone twist our arms into producing the code

[hrothgar]

I don't think they should charge for ALL TEAM events. The current TEAM GAME room would remain unchanged... and free. They should charge for the premium service of TEAM TOURNAMENTS, where you enter your team and are automatically pitted against three to however many other teams. You don' thave to find your opponents or go through the normal hassles of setting up a team event. Just register and start on time.

I think that you are confusing two very different concepts:

 

1. Running a tournament that features "teams" of four players

2. Providing a mechanism by which individual teams can get matched against one another

 

As I noted a couple times in the past, I'd very much like to see new functionality designed to accomplish the second goal. More specifically, I favor a "bottoms-up" matching system that permits a team of four to list that they are interested in a team match and permits other organized teams to challenge them to a 12 board match (or whatever)

 

I don't think that the tournament "format" adds all that much...

[inquiry]

An interested party could run a swiss team event by taking signups by hand, for instance, and constructing the matches and tracking the scores.  PITA, no doubt, but doable.  If someone wants to try, let me know and i'll bump up that persons TD rights to allow him to create XX simultaneous team games.

With HomeBase tools for processing Myhands data, Stephen and I would be well equipped for tracking the scores from multiple team games. We have considered this informally and even imported some team games as a trial, it works just as well as for tournaments.

 

The problem we see with this approach is to run a large swiss team event, playing 2 boards per "round" the logistic of creating 6 tables each round and tracking which players go to which tables would be some what daunting. And if it was more popular than that, it might be come totally unmanagable. (well if it was swiss with playbacks, the matching teams would be easier).

 

I don't have any interest in trying to set that up, but I maybe stephen might want to have a go at it.

 

As to richard, I have not confused the two issues. While you are interested in the second of your two items (providing a mechanism where teams can get matched up against each other), I have absolutely no interest in that. IF there was a button, "let me join a team a game" I would never push it. when people advertise in the lobby for team games, I ignore it.

 

The idea of a team game is to play with three other people you enjoy being with and "trust" to play seriously. Playing on a random team holds no interest for me. However, as my earlier post point out, I am VERY INTERESTED in team tournaments. I have played in several of the large ones organized on BBO (knockout and round robin) and I would love to register as a team in a large BAM or SWISS event on line. The few times I ahve ventured out to tourmaments in the past dozen years have all been in team evetns. I prefer them. So if YOU WILL ALLOW ME (please) my personal preferences (Thank you very much for allowing me my preference), I would greatly prefer TEAM TOURNAMENTS online to pairs or individuals. I think my long history of post on this subject (only a few linked above), show this is what I want and that I ahve not confused the subject. If anyone has confused it, it is you. I mearly quoted UDAY suggesing he would "fix" that "problem" (finding partners and opponents is not a problem I preceive, nor worry about).

 

Playing some random 12 hand against some random 4 opponents is not soemthing that greatly interest me. Playing 12 hands, two each against different teams, and seeing who wins after 12 hands where you are not held hostage to the random nature of the "field" for field protection, however is.

[hrothgar]

> As to richard, I have not confused the two issues.

 

Strange that none of your "followup" discussion deals with the point that i was making...

 

>IF there was a button, "let me join a team a game" I would never push it.

>When people advertise in the lobby for team games, I ignore it.

 

>The idea of a team game is to play with three other people you enjoy being with and >"trust" to play seriously. Playing on a random team holds no interest for me.

 

I suggested a system in which groups of 4 players organize themselves into teams. (I don't really care much where these teams come from. Players would certainly have the ability to have a pre-made team consisting of two regular partnerships)

 

Once teams have been formed, they (should) have a simple mechanism to get matched against another team for a game.

 

>Playing some random 12 hand against some random 4 opponents is not something >that greatly interest me. Playing 12 hands, two each against different teams, and >seeing who wins after 12 hands where you are not held hostage to the random >nature of the "field" for field protection, however is.

 

A swiss teams event where you are playing a two board match against each team still sounds like a crap shoot to me. If you want to reduce variance play a long head-to-head match against a single team.

[inquiry]

> As to richard, I have not confused the two issues.

 

Strange that none of your "followup" discussion deals with the point that i was making...

 

(((SNIP))))

 

>Playing some random 12 hand against some random 4 opponents is not something >that greatly interest me. Playing 12 hands, two each against different teams, and >seeing who wins after 12 hands where you are not held hostage to the random >nature of the "field" for field protection, however is.

On one hand you say none of my follow up addresses your issue (you want your four guys to form a team and then randomly play 12 hands against someone else after they have formed their own team).... And then you follow with my quote, that just playing against some random 4 opponents is not something I am interested in. That IS EXACTLY the model you propose.

 

In general, when I play in a team game I know my opponents (or at least of few of them) in addition to my team mates. I hate playing in a team game against outmatched opponents. I think the best matches are when the teams are equal (or my team is inferior, as I don't mind playing up.... ).

 

Your model takes all the control out of the players hands on who they play against. Now a similar situation exist in a swiss team event (2 boards, 3 boards, 4 boards per round) but with a huge difference. One or two teams you play against might be weak, but then you will have to beat them worse than the other strong teams beat them if you want to win. And you have the variety (multiple opponents to play against).

 

As for this comment by you...

 

A swiss teams event where you are playing a two board match against each team still sounds like a crap shoot to me.  If you want to reduce variance play a long head-to-head match against a single team.

 

You got to be kidding me right? Let's compare to types of BBO tournaments. A pair event you enter with your favorite partner (12 boards, 6 rounds) and a SWISS team event you enter with your favorite team (same criteria). In the pair event, three boards come up and your opponents bid and make game, and you herorically hold them to each one when there could easily be an overtrick. Then they bid slam and make that. In the pairs game it is all over. You have lost 3 to 5 imps on each of the three games, and probaly 7 to 9 on the slam. You are about 20 imps in the hole. In a team game, you won three imps on the game hands and broke even on the slam hand if your partners are the good pair you know them to be. On the BBO there is very little field protection, in a team game, your team-mates provide the protection when the cards run against you at your table, and if was BAM, you actually have a huge lead now if saving an overtrick was missed at the other table.

 

You want to control the variance by playing 12 boards against a team of unknown ability. Give me a good opponent, and I would love to play 12, 24, 28 boards against them, that is as much fun as in a tournament. But with no single strong team around to play, I would prefer team tournaments to random team games. Perhaps it is just me, but please, again, richard, allow me personal preferences... you can go beat up on beginners all you want.... and who do you think you will get looking for "random opponents" to tie up an hour to two of team play? Great players? No way dude.

[hrothgar]

Give me a good opponent, and I would love to play 12, 24, 28 boards against them, that is as much fun as in a tournament. But with no single strong team around to play, I would prefer team tournaments to random team games. Perhaps it is just me, but please, again, richard, allow me personal preferences... you can go beat up on beginners all you want.... and who do you think you will get looking for "random opponents" to tie up an hour to two of team play? Great players? No way dude.

The system that I suggested provides a mechanism by which individual teams can challenge one another. It does not require that those challenges be accepted. Hypothetically, if your team felt that some challenger wasn't up to snuff, simply decline the invitation to play. If anything, this type of structure provides a lot more choice about who you will be mathced against.

 

As to your comment about your "personal preferences":

 

You are, of course, entitled to your own opinions. However, in this case, you are taking an advocacy position. You are arguing that BBO prioritize resources towards one of your pet projects and suggesting changes to the business model towards this end.

 

Personally, I don't think that this feature adds that much to the user experience and don't see anything wrong with critiquing your suggestions.

[mike777]

The ACBL-in-memphis is not clear about whether we'll be able to issue MasterPoints for swiss teams.  Our sanction is a club sanction, and swiss teams are not usually run at the club level. There are no standardized MP scales for club-level swiss teams, as I understand it.  Being allowed to issue MPs would probably make someone twist our arms into producing the code

Uday I do remember years ago having swiss team matches at the local club level and masterpoints awarded.

I do not see why the ACBL cannot grant them and somehow a program developed for the movement. Granted the point awards will be tiny but it would be fun.

 

Despite all the sarcastic remarks over the decades masterpoints do work as a marketing tool for bridge.

 

Subbing may be an issue but the players did pay a buck to play.

 

Btw as a side question in the ACBL online MP games are the movements random?

BTW2, ok I figured out how to do one box partial quote now how do I do multiple box partial quotes from someone's post? :huh:.

[uday]

In our acbl online games the movements are not random: EW up one table each round within the section. Playbacks are uncommon. Individuals also follow a movement that avoids playbacks (thanks to Cascade).

 

Unclocked events ( our acbl games are "clocked") pair people up based on when they finish the previous round. They are far more irregular than clocked movements. You might easily play the same pair more than once, or sit NS once and EW the next time.

 

Swiss ( and survivor) pair movements match up the best scores when each round starts. Here too, you might play the same opp. more than once.

[mike777]

As others have pointed out having short 90 minute (12 deal) tourneys is ideal for internet bridge. This may mean having 4 matches of 6 deals each spread out over 2 days or shudder trying to get players to commit to 180 minutes. Yes, this is yet another problem but I hope we can get the ACBL to allow it and give it a shot.

 

Other posts have commented on the problem of Ladders and putting together leagues. With all that said, lets give it another go. If you find an ideal method for the true experts to want to join in so much the better.

[sfbp]

You can run a mitchell with 4 pairs as a team event. This might be a nice addition to the current team events where you don't get to meet the other opponents.

 

The biggest problem with 4-pair mitchells is that you need the pairs to sign up in the right order (or tolerate random teammates). This could be solved in software.

[sceptic]

The find-a-random-team-game function in help-me-find-a-game is one of the least used functions on BBO.

 

Thats probably because we don't know how to use it, I have tried using it a few times and nothing happens

[uday]

when 8 people have signed up, a team game is formed.

[barmar]

The ACBL-in-memphis is not clear about whether we'll be able to issue MasterPoints for swiss teams.  Our sanction is a club sanction, and swiss teams are not usually run at the club level. There are no standardized MP scales for club-level swiss teams, as I understand it.  Being allowed to issue MPs would probably make someone twist our arms into producing the code

Uday I do remember years ago having swiss team matches at the local club level and masterpoints awarded.

The ACBL-sanctioned club I go to regularly holds Swiss Team games every couple of months, and another club in our area holds one every Sunday. And there certainly is a standard scale of masterpoint awards. I did a little searching on the ACBL web site and found it this index of MP awards for all the different types of games that ACBL sanctions:

 

http://web2.acbl.org/handbook/handbook/mindex.htm