Bbradley62 Posted August 1, 2012 Report Share Posted August 1, 2012 They're the Free Robot Duplicates. They run once an hour at xx:15. Registration starts at xx:10, and they only allow 10 entries, so they fill up quickly.Not correct time information. As a staff member, you should check your facts before posting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted August 1, 2012 Report Share Posted August 1, 2012 Having a free tournament is a poor way to evaluate whether or not a format is appealing to the players. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bbradley62 Posted August 1, 2012 Report Share Posted August 1, 2012 Having a free tournament is a poor way to evaluate whether or not a format is appealing to the players.That may depend on your definition of "the players". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barmar Posted August 1, 2012 Report Share Posted August 1, 2012 Not correct time information. As a staff member, you should check your facts before posting.I did, but I made a mistake. I was looking at the free robot race, not the free dupe. Now I can't find where we have the timing for the free dupe configured. We have two ways of setting these things up, and I don't remember the file with the other way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barmar Posted August 1, 2012 Report Share Posted August 1, 2012 Having a free tournament is a poor way to evaluate whether or not a format is appealing to the players.The idea was to try it out first in the smallest tourney, to minimize the impact. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bbradley62 Posted August 1, 2012 Report Share Posted August 1, 2012 Now I can't find where we have the timing for the free dupe configured. We have two ways of setting these things up, and I don't remember the file with the other way.See post #24. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barmar Posted August 1, 2012 Report Share Posted August 1, 2012 See post #24.That doesn't say where on our servers the timing is configured. But I just found it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nathan2008 Posted August 2, 2012 Report Share Posted August 2, 2012 haven't been here for a long time because of the poor connection i had before. hope everything is ok. I think if u put "human declarer", please remove "best hand"... I am not sure players prefer "best hands" or "human dec"... maybe u can put 2 kinds of games.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted August 2, 2012 Report Share Posted August 2, 2012 haven't been here for a long time because of the poor connection i had before. hope everything is ok. I think if u put "human declarer", please remove "best hand"... I am not sure players prefer "best hands" or "human dec"... maybe u can put 2 kinds of games.... Disagree. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Finch Posted August 3, 2012 Report Share Posted August 3, 2012 let's hear from you. I asked a friend who plays a lot of money bridge & robot games (I don't). He's a very strong declarer. Specifically for the robot races, his immediate reaction was that it's a bad idea, because he thinks a good part of the skill in the races is manipulating the auction to get the robot to declare particularly game & slam hands. He says that usually declarer skill is less important than declarer speed, so you get more points if the robot plays the contract as they are very very fast. Therefore changing to 'human declares' reduces the skill of the event, hence it is a bad idea. Obviously this is irrelevant for duplicates. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted August 3, 2012 Report Share Posted August 3, 2012 I asked a friend who plays a lot of money bridge & robot games (I don't). He's a very strong declarer. Specifically for the robot races, his immediate reaction was that it's a bad idea, because he thinks a good part of the skill in the races is manipulating the auction to get the robot to declare particularly game & slam hands. He says that usually declarer skill is less important than declarer speed, so you get more points if the robot plays the contract as they are very very fast. Therefore changing to 'human declares' reduces the skill of the event, hence it is a bad idea. Obviously this is irrelevant for duplicates. I think the human declares is being proposed for robo-doops, not robo races. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bbradley62 Posted August 3, 2012 Report Share Posted August 3, 2012 Therefore changing to 'human declares' reduces the skill of the event, hence it is a bad idea.I would suggest that changing to 'human declares' changes the skill of the event, not reduces it, since it's an exchange of your ability to manipulate an auction to your ability to quickly and effectively declare a contract. Edit: This change would reduce overall scores in races, so no one would choose to use the 'human declares' option to play against opponents who don't, but I think it's absurd (at best) to say that changing to 'human declares' reduces the skill of the event. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bbradley62 Posted August 3, 2012 Report Share Posted August 3, 2012 Having now played 20 "human declares" tournaments in the 8 days since they became available, I'm surprised to say that my overall response is "it's not a big deal". It does put a little more time pressure on the player since you don't get the occassional "fast hand" (I was averaging about 1.3 hands as dummy per 8-board tournament), and it does make tournaments last essentially the full 25 minutes. However, I was expecting to find that more players were not finishing, but that's not the case. (It actually appears that, in my admittedly small sample size, players have a slightly higher tournament completion rate than before.) It does mean that I more wholeheartedly set aside the 25 minutes for this one activity, rather than getting lunch, etc, etc, but maybe that's a good thing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
diana_eva Posted August 3, 2012 Report Share Posted August 3, 2012 Geez how did you manage to play 20 lol. I only managed to register to ONE, and I've been chasing them since they were launched :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bbradley62 Posted August 3, 2012 Report Share Posted August 3, 2012 Geez how did you manage to play 20 lol. I only managed to register to ONE, and I've been chasing them since they were launched :DYou really have to camp out on them. I've posted before that I think I get into about one-third of the Free Robot Dupes that I try to register for. I've played 38 in the past 30 days, which I guess makes me a semi-regular. There are several people who average 8-12 per day, day in and day out. I still think there should be a limit on the total number of free robot tournaments (dupes, race, bingo combined) someone can play -- something like 99 per 30 days? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quantumcat Posted August 6, 2012 Report Share Posted August 6, 2012 Will there at least be a choice? I would rather play all the hands in matchpoint duplicate, but in robot races part of the strategy is manipulating GIB. If you don't let GIB declare then robot races will suddenly become boring. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barmar Posted August 6, 2012 Report Share Posted August 6, 2012 We enable and disable this option by the type of tourney (more specifically, a particular series of tourney -- free MP dups, free IMP dups, $0.25 dups are different from each other). We don't currently have a way of giving the player the choice. So if we decide to make robot race use human declarers, it will apply to everyone playing in robot race. The results of the survey will probably be the biggest determinant in how we expand this. My guess is that race/rewards will probably be unchanged. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heron Posted August 13, 2012 Author Report Share Posted August 13, 2012 Having now played 20 "human declares" tournaments in the 8 days since they became available, I'm surprised to say that my overall response is "it's not a big deal". It does put a little more time pressure on the player since you don't get the occassional "fast hand" (I was averaging about 1.3 hands as dummy per 8-board tournament), and it does make tournaments last essentially the full 25 minutes.This turns out to be my biggest complaint. With the new "human declares" format combined with "best hand south", I'm doing declarer play for just about every hand, and if more than a couple require serious thought and I'm actually paying attention and want to give it that thought, I'll get timed out instead of finishing. (I just played one, for example, in which I passed out a rather unspired flat 14-count. In other circumstances I absolutely would have opened it and gone down 1-2 along with everyone else. Kind of annoying way to get a top!) One might argue that my declarer play should be faster, but it's also certainly the cast that BBO has decreased the average amount of time available per hand-played-as-declarer in these. I don't think I'd want to pay money for that format without having correspondingly more time available. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted August 13, 2012 Report Share Posted August 13, 2012 If more than a couple require serious thought and I'm actually paying attention and want to give it that thought, I'll get timed out instead of finishing. So the new format requires that the human put more effort into it, and is thus a better measurement of skill. Gotcha. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted August 13, 2012 Report Share Posted August 13, 2012 We enable and disable this option by the type of tourney (more specifically, a particular series of tourney -- free MP dups, free IMP dups, $0.25 dups are different from each other). We don't currently have a way of giving the player the choice. So if we decide to make robot race use human declarers, it will apply to everyone playing in robot race. The results of the survey will probably be the biggest determinant in how we expand this. My guess is that race/rewards will probably be unchanged. The ACBL's biggest beef is that robots are playing in place of players. If BBO can reduce the robot element by the greatest extent possible, shouldn't that be an objective of setting the format? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
semeai Posted August 13, 2012 Report Share Posted August 13, 2012 f more than a couple require serious thought and I'm actually paying attention and want to give it that thought, I'll get timed out instead of finishing.So the new format requires that the human put more effort into it, and is thus a better measurement of skill. Gotcha. Seems like Heron's just pointing out that a slightly longer time limit may be good for the human declares games. It will still be more skill based with another 5 minutes on the clock. A 10 minute time limit would require a lot of skill, but it wouldn't exactly be pleasant. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted August 13, 2012 Report Share Posted August 13, 2012 Seems like Heron's just pointing out that a slightly longer time limit may be good for the human declares games. It will still be more skill based with another 5 minutes on the clock. That seems reasonable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bbradley62 Posted August 13, 2012 Report Share Posted August 13, 2012 Note that the $0.25 (and free) Dupe games are 8 boards in 25 minutes, whereas the $1 ACBL games are 12 boards in 55 minutes, so it's not clear that the ACBL games would need more time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bbradley62 Posted August 17, 2012 Report Share Posted August 17, 2012 The results of the survey will probably be the biggest determinant in how we expand this. Are there any reportable results of the survey? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jyrki_63 Posted September 13, 2012 Report Share Posted September 13, 2012 Since I voted "other", it behooves me to scribble down an explanation. Basically this is a good idea - for the reasons repeated many times over. I very much like it in the 25 cent games as well as the $1 55% target MPs - given the extra time. I have given up on the Robot Races, but it does seem to me that it might be nice to have GIB declare its share of hands in that format. It's a well known RR gambit to steer GIB to declare, when you absolutely need the points, and time is running out. I would suggest that you poll more RR players for their opinions. Other than this minor reservation: Thumbs up! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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