tourney system

[MadMax]

I've noticed you are working on a new kind of tournament where everybody plays all the deals without delays and there's actually no such thing as "round". I think it's much better than the way it is now, but in my opinion you're going in a wrong direction. The best kind of tournament is a barometer where all the results are compared after each round and pairs with the same score play against each other(the only reason why not every offline tourney is made this way is the dificulty to organize it - but there's no dificulty online). On both commercial servers e-bridge and okbridge there are no other kinds of tourneys than barometers. I'm not a programmer so i don't know how dificult it is to make such thing but i'm sure everybody agrees it would be greatest fun. Have you thought of it? Is it dificult?

[uday]

In an ideal world we'd leave it up to the owner of the tourney to decide for himself what matters most to his users.

 

I think what you are describing is a Swiss movement. I don't know how popular they are. We don't see many real-world swiss-pair movements in the US, but that might only be because they'd be difficult to set up.

 

A barometer movement might also be interesting; one in which you know what your score is at the end of each round. Might lead to shooting and crazy scores towards the end of the tourney.

 

But, there is a fundamental tension between convenience and accuracy here. If you want to be matched up against a similar score, you'll have to wait until all the other tables have finished. And then we're back to the old kind of movement, with all the associated problems.

 

I realize from our untimed movement this morning that some pairs play just about twice as fast as others, and it must be excruciating to wait between each round. As a sometimes director, I'd be partial to the unclocked movement. Of course, others may feel differently and I want to cater to more than my own whims.

 

At some point we'll add these to the options for the host. The programming is relatively straightforward; the difficulty lies in selecting this over something else. I dont know why the commercial bridge services select specific tourney formats; perhaps it has something to do w/masterpoints? In any case, they have their own agendas. Mine involves making it attractive and easy for someone to be the host at his own tourney, and making it possible to run tourneys without a host/director.

 

Until we can find a way to run unattended tourneys, we wont be able to schedule too many regular tourneys (since directing for free isnt the most fun way to spend an hour). I think the untimed movement is a step forward (fewer director calls for slowness or adjustments).

 

uday

[mink]

hi Uday!

 

for sure the owner of a tourney should decide which movement he likes best.

 

However, team events with much more teams than rounds are always performed with a swiss movement, because otherwise a good team may be lucky to play only against weak teams and win that way.

 

There are at least 3 reasons why pair events are not run with swiss:

 

1. If you play with real cards, most time you have only a limited number of board and a limited capacity to duplicate boards. So you have to use the same physical board in several rounds. It is impossible to play swiss now, as very soon you do not find a set of boards that both pais selcted by the swiss algorithm have not played yet.

 

2. Even if you have enough pre-duplicated boards so that you can play the same deal at all tables simultaneously, typing in the results of each round and announcing the pairs to play next round is so time-consuming that players would be bored by the delays caused that way.

 

3. At most tourneys in the clubs the number of pairs is not very much greater than the number of rounds, so a swiss movement wouldn't be possible even disregarding points 1 and 2.

 

All three reasons not to have a swiss movement do not apply to online tourneys. There is one reason, however, that applies to both ftf and online tourneys: You have to wait for all tables to complete before you can start the next round. This would be a deterioration compared to the not time-limited movement you have recently described and already tested.

 

But the "no-timelimit-tourney" has a disadvantage, too: "some pairs play just about twice as fast as others", you wrote. I played that tourney and had to wait quite long in the middle of the night for some pairs to finish (only a minority was that slow) in order to see the tourney result. Fortunately, I was not locked to my tourney table for that time but could do whatever I wanted - e. g. watch at a table still playing and see what they do with the boards that I already played.

 

There is another disadantage with the non-timelimit: Pairs that think a lot are often either very good or beginners. As this movement tends to let fast pairs against each other and slow pairs against each other this would result in experts playing against the beginners and therebye win easily, assuming that there are fewer experts than beginners.

 

I like to propose now a kind of movement that combines the advantages of swiss, unlimited time and limited time and avoids the disadvantages:

 

There is a timelimit for each round, which can be as long as the host desires (I would vote for 6 minutes per board). Next round starts when the timelimit is over AND at least 80% of the tables have finished - in that way, the timelimit is automatically exceeded if there are difficult boards involved. When the next round starts, tables that are not yet ready are allowed to finish the board they are currently playing. But when that board is finished, the round is over for that table, and both pairs are seated for the next round already in progress. This means that there is never an unfinished board due to the timelimit that would require a director to assign a result, but maybe there are boards that could not be played. For these, the software should assign an artificial score, giving average- for a pair that caused the delay and average+ for an innocent pair. A pair which is late for one round and therefore starts the next round later than most others, can try to play faster in order to catch up with the rest and thereby avoid to miss a board. In order to be able to determine which pair is responsible for slow play the software must measure the thinking time of each player. It is possible that both pairs receive an average- for a board that is missed due to slow play of both pairs in a previous round.

 

If there are less then 2 minutes left for the current round, a new board of that round is not started anymore but missed.

 

If a player is not online when a new round starts, that pair is not seated until he reconnects. Software should monitor the time a player is offline and remove the pair from the tourney if this time exceeds a percentage of the elapsed time. If a player is not online for 3 minutes without returning, the board in play should be cancelled and the director should be automatically called to assign a result. There should be no penalties for bad connection, though, and a pair should not be made responsible for a delay caused by bad connection - in such a case both pairs might get a average+ for a missed board.

 

In a swiss movement, of couse you cannot seat the pairs for the next round based on the results of the current round if not all tables are ready. Therefore I suggest to take the results of the second last round as the basis for seating the pairs for the next round. Seating for rounds 1 and 2 is done at random. Only pairs that finish a round in time (this includes those who missed a board as there was less the 2 minutes time) are seated in the swiss way. The slow pairs are seated in the order they finish. Software should refrain from seating 2 pairs if that would cause any 2 of the remaining unseated pairs to play against each other again.

 

As the results of the previous round are known prior to the end of the current round, seating for the next round can be done premature if fitting pairs finish the current round prior to its end. In that way all the moving of pairs is not required to happen at the same time, thereby avoiding a peek of system load. And the pairs could introduce themselves and inform each other about the systems they play. However, giving the cards to these early-fromed tables should be delayed until the start of the next round, as it would be unfair if some had more time for the boards than others.

 

Of couse, all ideas presented here would still make sense if there is no swiss seating but all pairs are seated randomly in all rounds.

 

Advantages achieved:

 

• no unfinished board
  
• time the tourney takes is known in advance, apart from slow play in the last round
  
• no need to find subs (but still possible)
  
• very few work for directors
  
• swiss seating possible
  
• sitouts caused by odd number of pairs tend affect those who played slow
  
• slow players have a reason to play faster
  

 

I hope I could contribute something useful.

 

Karl

[Cave_Draco]

Swiss team-of-four is my favourite, ;D.

 

You don't have to estimate what the "room" is doing, just the other table.

 

However, it would require more social interaction than pairs... I can think of several pairs who I/we would be happy to team up with.