Permanent Floating Indy...

[hrothgar]

Hi All

 

I just signed up to direct matches on BBO. To date, my only experience has been running relatively small individual tournaments. 8 board matches with between 32 and 40 players.

 

I deliberately chose this format because I fwlt that it offered the least opportunity for problems. There are no regular partnerships which eliminates many of the traditional causes for director's calls. [Hard to accuse a pickup partnership of a conceal partnership understanding...]

 

In any case, the format has proved to be extremely popular and its never taken more than 5 minutes to fill a 40 board tournament. Indeed, I have lots of folks asking me to extend the number of players. (to date, I've resisted since I've been afraid of getting swamped by direcotr's calls). However, to date, the only "real" work that I've had to do has been arranging substitutes for players who hang...

 

From my perspective, there may be substantial demand for a "permanent" individual tournament that didn't necessarily require the presence of a director.

 

The core of the system would consist of the following:

 

1. The tournament consists of an infinite number of 1 board rounds of MP or IMP boards.

 

2. The BBO server will store player's cumulative score in this event.

 

2. The tournament is clocked. In a simple implement, the round timer would be set at 8 minutes. A more complex implementation would dynamically adjust the round time.

 

3. At the end of each round, players are matched to tables using a modified swiss algorithm. Create a list of all players who want to participate in the round N+1 of the tournament. This includes players who want to join the event as well as players who wish to continue playing.

 

A. Divide the set of players into two pools. The first is the set of players who have completed at least 20 boards. The second is the set of players who have completed between 0-9 boards. (This implementation is suggested to avoid players jumping to table 1 based on a single "top")

 

B. Allocate sufficient tables to seat all players interested in ccompeting. Match Pool 1 players to tables using astandard Swiss algoithm. Match Pool 2 players to tables using a standard swiss algorithm.

 

4. Allow players to provide for their own substitutes. Any player whose partner has been red-dotted can invite a substitue off the list.

 

In an ideal world, this could run 24x7, without the need for a tournament director.

 

In reality, I can see some potential for problems. In particular, players would have an incentive to fail to finish boards to avoid bad scores.

 

Equally significant, there could be a problem in which a player left their computer but left themselves logged in to the event creating a permanent ghost.

 

Finally, in creating a status symbol (playing at table 1), we'd create an incentive for cheating. With this said and done, I'm guessing that table 1 would recieve a fair number of spectators so the problem would HOPEFULLY self correct.

 

From my perspective, the best way to handle this would be to have a permanet pool of director's willing to step in when their presence would be required.

 

I recognize that this would require some coding. At the same time, I think that this would provide a lot of value to the membership.

 

As always, constructive criticism more than welcome.

[jikl]

Personally, I like the idea; however there are too many problems.

 

In some ways it will create a ranking system. Minor problem in context of this issue, but still important. Having it clocked creates all sorts of problems. Having it unclocked creates other problems. :) At the moment we don't have a Swiss Indy that I know of, so new code for this. Permanent Indy is new code also.

 

Personally I would like to see real Indy and Howell movements first.

 

Sean

[Dwingo]

Interesting & Out of the Box.

 

hrothgar, whats your take on how the results will be calculated/tabulated with people getting ON & OFF the moving Indy Train

[nikos59]

The idea is excellent -i am waiting for Uday to give

an opinion as to the technical problems.

 

nikos

[hrothgar]

Interesting & Out of the Box.

 

hrothgar, whats your take on how the results will be calculated/tabulated with people getting ON & OFF the moving Indy Train

"Out of the Box" has long been my middle name...

 

In any case, in answer to your question - JKL has already addressed this indirectly:

 

The only result that is "relevant" is the cumulative score, which serves as an unofficial ranking scheme. I don't see how entry/exit criteria would cause any significant problems, however, I could be missing something. Happens all too frequently.

[mink]

I doubt that the effort to implement this idea is justified by the added value the customers of bbo gain from this. If it is desired to have the frequent opportunity to join a tourney, even today there are a lot of tourneys available where you have to pay a $. I guess that a free tourney where you can enter any time would compete with the current payed tourneys and draw customers away from them. Neither the directors of the payed tourneys nor the BBO management could be really happy with that, as both earn well-deserved money with the current tourneys.

 

But even if not considering this topic, I would rather suggest to have directorless tourneys that automatically start say every half hour (both indi and pairs). This would require nearly no extra coding, apart from some method to avoid unfinished boards and to get rid of non-responsive players. But these would be devellopments to the benefit of all tourneys.

 

Karl

[hrothgar]

I doubt that the effort to implement this idea is justified by the added value the customers of bbo gain from this. If it is desired to have the frequent opportunity to join a tourney, even today there are a lot of tourneys available where you have to pay a $. I guess that a free tourney where you can enter any time would compete with the current payed tourneys and draw customers away from them. Neither the directors of the payed tourneys nor the BBO management could be really happy with that, as both earn well-deserved money with the current tourneys.

I recognize the existence of a large number of fee based tournaments on BBO.

I'm also a strong supported of Bridge Bucks. I've bought and spent quite a few...

 

With this said and done, for profit tournaments need to offer something to justify their fees. With all due respect, if tournament director's can't differentiate their service from something like the "Permanent Floating Indy", then why should anyone pay for the priviledge of playing in one of these events?

 

I can list a number of reasons why players would chose to to pay for a tournament director:

 

1. Masterpoints

2.Guarunteeing a high quality director enforcing a known and consistant set of regulations

3.Value added services (for example, analysis of hands after the event)

 

From my perspective, #2 and #3 by far the most compelling reasons to pay for an event...

 

I will note that “charity” or the desire to support BBO is not one of the reasons that I list. The reason for this is quite simple: If I am going to pay money to support BBO, I would prefer to pay the money directly to BBO and not split the funds between BBO and a third party.

[nikos59]

I don't seem to agree with Mink's arguments.

If the supreme consideration is the well-being

of tourney organizers, then stop Vugraphs also

since many people who watch Vugraphs might

be lured to a paying tourney instead.

 

n

[ack_hh]

From my perspective, there may be substantial demand for a "permanent" individual tournament that didn't necessarily require the presence of a director.

 

The core of the system would consist of the following:

 

1. The tournament consists of an infinite number of 1 board rounds of MP or IMP boards.

 

2. The BBO server will store player's cumulative score in this event.

I love this idea.

[mink]

hrothgar:

I can list a number of reasons why players would chose to to pay for a tournament director: ...

I still believe that the most important reason to play the payed tourneys is that there are many more of them than free tourneys. If you restrict yourself to free tourneys, you often cannot play when you would like to. And often a free tourney is already full when you discover it.

 

Unfortunately nobody responded to the second argument in my post, that frequent directorless automatically launched tourneys would serve the same purpose as a permanent floating tourney, but could be implemented with much less effort. This was my main point.

 

Karl

[hrothgar]

hrothgar:

I can list a number of reasons why players would chose to to pay for a tournament director: ...

I still believe that the most important reason to play the payed tourneys is that there are many more of them than free tourneys. If you restrict yourself to free tourneys, you often cannot play when you would like to. And often a free tourney is already full when you discover it.

 

Unfortunately nobody responded to the second argument in my post, that frequent directorless automatically launched tourneys would serve the same purpose as a permanent floating tourney, but could be implemented with much less effort. This was my main point.

 

Karl

Mink,

 

Regretfully, none of us are in a position to know how much effort would be required to implement this feature.

 

My gut says that your right and that automatic tounrament lauch would be less effort to implement. With this said and done, this format offers much less flexibility to players.

 

Unclear whether the added development cost is worth the effort.

[helene_t]

I like this idea.

 

Instead of splitting the field in 20+ and 19- players, the Swiss algortihm could be based on a Bayesian estimator for the ranks. This would be more accurate and also reduce the problem with off-peak hours, during which there may be too few players in either of the two groups.

 

As for players who get "red" in order to avoid a bad score: if the ranks are based the current tournament only, it's not a problem, but instead we will have a problem with players who escape a low-ranking table by leaving the tournament for a single round in order to begin at an intermediate table. Alernatively, getting red could result in a score of, say, -4 IMPs.