well, I will be on vacation for the next week, so I won't be online as much, but yes I still want to have the tourney

in

true for mute , false for John Doe
true for popeye, false for Joe Average

hehehehe

I'm in. For fun or $, doesn't matter one bit.

I'm in too. It would be nice to find a site that will host private tournies. FIBS might do that, I'm not sure.

Also, to answer a previous question, javafibs runs on a mac. Go to fibs.com and drill down to mac clients.

Count me in if it's for just for fun

Okay, here's a list of interested players:

Quote this and add your name if you are interested and not listed

djk123
Aaron W.
dsaxton
ChrisV
hallberg
thesilkworm
chipslinger
popeye
noir_desir
sixfour
franzinator
indariva
catoandtonic
bernudadude
theriver
mute
swede
mr.barbegris
pocket trips

Some suggestions for format/rules:

--Once we have all the entrants, we can make a bracket then go to http://www.random.org/ and key in the number of entrants to determine the seat draw.

--Once the seats are posted, each pair of players will have 1 week to complete the matches. Any arguments/problems will be solved by the tourney director. Hopefully everyone will be reasonable and there will be no problems.

--Winner of each matchup will be declared if he wins 2 out of 3 matches played to 7 points each. Both people should report the results of the match to the tourney director.

--A general rule of 45 seconds max per turn. But please don't take that long every turn.

--Cube is in effect. No auto-double on first roll for thrown doubles. Beavers/raccoons on. Crawford rule is used. No jacoby rule.

All I got for now. Just wanted to throw some suggestions out there.

Regarding time, I guess different servers have different setups. IIRC TMG has x sec per move and then a timebank of x minutes. I'm fine with whatever is decided and I doubt it will become an issue.

I've never heard of beavers/raccoons being used in matchplay.

Beavers will not, and should not be, possible in match play at any self-respecting bg-server )

I would prefer longer matches. If it is a time issue I would prefer one match to 15 vrather then 2 7-pointers. About time per move and time-bank if playing at a server with clocks we will probably just have to use what is set there. If we end up by playing at FIBS... well ) Certain decisions take more than 45 seconds.

Usually they play delay plus reserve time. 12 second delay plus 2 minutes per point. I don't know what clock settings are available online, but this should be more than enough because the delay won't be partly chewed up by shaking and rolling. (To be honest, I don't think time will be *that* much of an issue unless someone is really, really slow. I think people would play online faster than they do OTB.)

I prefer a series of shorter matches to a long match. I think it's better than a long match because the cube handling becomes much more interesting.

No.

Beavers/raccoons out, my bad.

Wrong.

Explain.

Cube handling far from either player reaching victory is close to money cubing. In shorter matches, you face a lot of match equity decisions when thinking about cubes. Furthermore, in those cube handling situations, you then face a different class of checker decisions (DMP, GG, GS positions that arise because of the cube).

Bigger cubes are not necessarily more interesting cubes.

The default time setting on TrueMoneyGames is a minute per move plus a 2-minute timebank for the whole match. I don't think that setting can be changed. Since this is a for-fun thing, I don't think it would really matter if different brackets use different time settings, as long as they're agreed upon in advance.

I'm interested, for low stakes or just for fun. Updated list cut and pasted from above:


djk123
Aaron W.
dsaxton
ChrisV
hallberg
thesilkworm
chipslinger
popeye
noir_desir
sixfour
franzinator
indariva
catoandtonic
bernudadude
theriver
mute
swede
mr.barbegris
pocket trips
Siegmund

djk123
Aaron W.
dsaxton
ChrisV
hallberg
thesilkworm
chipslinger
popeye
noir_desir
sixfour
franzinator
indariva
catoandtonic
bernudadude
theriver
mute
swede
mr.barbegris
pocket trips
Siegmund
HowardZinn

Please PM me when you guys get this set up!

I'm a little out of shape, but i was a low 1700 player on gammonempire/play65 a couple years ago.

I'm interested and willing to play just for fun.

As soon as one player gets a non-trivial lead in a long match the cube decisions will be different from in $-games. Big cubes *are* interesting because computing cube vigorish or lack of it becomes more difficult and important in order to compute takepoints. Your statement at first was about how difficult cube-handling was in matches and not about the number of difficult decisions. It could be that the number of non-trivial cube-decisions in 3 7-pointers is higher than eg. in a single 21-pointer but in general the harder ones will be in the long match. The situatuions that can occur in any of those three 7-pointers is a small subset of those that can inthe 21-pointer. Handling the cube perfectly is more difficult in longer matches than in shorter matches.

What are peoples' opinions about best of 3 matches to 11 points? Originally, I thought that it would be too long, but 7 point matches is very short. I think if we iron out the details, we are much more likely to actually go through with the tournament.

So right now we have 3 choices nominated:

-best of 3 matches to 7
-best of 3 matches to 11
-one match to 15

Feel free to comment on these or nominate what you think might be best.

id probably rather just do one to 15. dont really see the point of multiple matches. If a short match is too random, make the match longer.

out of those three options i think id rather do best of 3 to 11. i wouldn't mind doing one long match, but i think it should be longer than 15.

Regarding the best of 3 formats versus the single longer match format:

Kent Goulding and I did some research on this back in the 1990s when we were planning the World Cup tournaments. If you have a given amount of time to play, and the goal is to give the better player a larger chance to win, then a single long match is a much better skill determinant than a series of best n-out-of-m matches.

This is counter-intuitive to most players, so here's the explanation.

Suppose A is a 60-40 favorite over B in an 11-point match. (Pretty typical for a strong open-division player against a weak open-division player.)

If A and B instead decide to play a best 2-out-of-3 series of 11-point matches, A becomes a 64.8-to-35.2 favorite, a very small increase. To see this, note that A has three different winning sequences:

1) He wins two straight, probability (0.6)*(0.6) = 0.36, or

2) He wins two and loses one, which can happen in either of two sequences, ABA or BAA, each of which has probability (0.6)(0.4)(0.6) = 0.144. So total probability of this is 2*0.144 = 0.288.

Total probability that A wins is 0.36 + 0.288 = 0.648.

On the other hand, the average time required to play a best 2-out-of-3 series is about 2 to 2.5 times as long as a single match. In that time, they could play instead one 25-point match. A player who's a 60-40 favorite in an 11-point match is on the order of a 75% to 80% favorite in a 25-point match. (This estimate is based on a lot of match data collected in the 1980s and early 1990s when such long matches were fairly common in big tournaments.)

So, if you want skill to have a better chance of dominating, play a single long match.

However, most people think that best n-of-m series are more exciting and more fun, which argues the other way.

Hope this helps.

interesting. would you have time to play in this Bill if we ever get it going?

I'm curious as to how you determined

1) That Player A is a 60-40 favorite against Player B in an 11 point match in your dataset
2) That a 60-40 edge is typical for a strong open player against a weak open player

I also would like to know if this analysis takes into account the development of match-dependent strategies (as something quite different from money games). I don't know when match equity was conceptually formalized into part of a strategy for match play, but my suspicion is that it didn't come about so much during the era of very long matches (because these situations are less common in long matches). I could be wrong.