No-one apart from Zac is interested? I thought it would be a good spot to generate some discussion. Imo there are FOUR viable options, which is incredibly unusual for Round 4. Using the system top, left, centre, right, bottom, these are:

22614 (Zac's first choice)
62214
22416 (Zac's other option, and the way I played it)
62421 (the play which would've given me the win)

At the time I was only considering the third and fourth options, so was disappointed to see that I picked the "wrong" one.

I think the second option is probably better than the first, slightly worse 6s setup but much better 2s. I'm unsure about the other three though, would probably lean towards second over third, but have no idea about comparing the fourth to the others, because in the fourth you have a much, much better chain setup but are sacrificing a fair amount of bonus EV.

I'd be really interested to hear peoples' thoughts.

Also, was gonna whine again about missing out on a win despite winning with almost 60% of final racks yesterday, but then noticed that Gaby wins with 96.5% of final racks. Brutal.

One more thing off the checklist, fitting that it happened in Timed too.



Grand Slam!



Here are the possibilities I came up with in pictures, they are the same you mention, so they should be the best options.









In the first the 2nd 2 to top isn't awful since it can be paired to center without blocking anything, it does prevent playing an extra 2 in last rack there though, and obviously it can't be paired with last rack.

I also think the 2nd one is better than the first one because of 2s, it is also stronger for 6s in some cases (with 2x6).

6s are so valuable I really don't like making them any weaker than necessary, so I'm not a big fan of the 3rd option.

The 4th one is interesting since it has way the best chains, but loses bonus immediately, I don't think it is that bad though. Sometimes, when there are a lot of 2s they are easy to dump with that too.

Haven't done any more specific analysis, so I have no idea what really is the best option here, but I'd guess number 2 or 4, maybe 4? Tough situation.

Yea, that sounds very brutal.

sick, TH10, congrats!

I reached double figures in DC wins yesterday

next stop - triple figures

Yeah, I noticed you seem to be crushing ATM.

I'd really like to play in this tournament at some point.

Well I'm not winning the DC today, but ship this:

http://triplechain.net/reconstruct?chain_id=1232905

Final Score: 68660
Chain 1: 2550
Chain 2: 875
Chain 3: 8
Bonus: 20

1st game i've scored every tile, but sooooo close to 70k (and like 5k better than my previous PB)

Well, now is your chance, Latt is online.

Nice score!

After what happened in this tournament, imo the next tournament should probably have a time limit to play the matches. Since it should be the goal to avoid DQ's, and considering time zone differences, 48 hours is probably not enough, but something like 96 or 120 hours should be. Or maybe 96 h + 48 h, where it is 96 h initially, then if both players have made a real effort and have clearly been online, but just haven't found a time suitable for both, they can be given an extension?

Yeah, I agree something like that is probably necessary.

I didn't see this in time. I can't sit online all day waiting just in case he shows up... This is actually really annoying, it feels like because he's so rarely available I have to make myself free whenever he is, which is annoying because I have a life too. It's becoming a chore and not fun at all, and it's hardly like I'm never available to play. If he's too busy to play he should just resign, like Gaby did. Imo.


We already have this rule:
"If the match hasn't been completed by the 48 hour deadline I will advance the person who made more of an effort to make the match happen."

It's never been enforced because we've never had this situation before really. If it's beyond the first round then what could/should happen is the person who was knocked out by the disqualified player (donk in this case) gets advanced, so the other player (me) doesn't get a bye (in effect the bye gets passed back down to donk).

I think I was playing 5 days out of 7 or something last week and showed up at a prearranged time on a day when I was really busy and had made a space in my day for the match. I'm really busy again tomorrow so I'm not gonna do the same given that he could easily just not show up again.

Sorry if this sounds petulant but it really is getting annoying.

I mean it's been 10 days and this is the first day he's been free to play, showing up with no warning.

While this sounds like a good idea in principle, the problem is that this would delay the tournament even more.

I pretty much completely agree with you here. While showing up is better than not showing up at all, the date and time should really be prearranged. Actually, below is what I wrote yesterday (copy-pasted from notepad), but after I saw Zac had addressed the issue in the TC main chat, I decided I didn't need to post it.

"I don't like doing this, since in my limited interaction with Latt we've been friendly in the chat, we both even have the same 3rd language, so we've spoken that just for fun a few times. But this is getting ridiculous, so something has to be said, it has been what 10 or 11 days that we've been allowed to play the 2nd round matches, Paul has made himself available to play on multiple occasions, and Latt hasn't been able to play a single time (arranged to play once, but no-showed that). I mean I understand being busy and all that, but if you commit to playing the tournament, you should really make an effort to arrange that 30 minutes to play the match within a reasonable time limit, 10/11 days is way too much. I really didn't like Gaby withdrawing from the tournament, but if this is the alternative, then what Gaby did is absolutely the right thing to do, so props to Gaby for that.

At this point surely we can't wait much longer. Even though the rules currently say 48 h (don't think there has been a case yet, where this meant anything), and Latt's lack of effort has been pretty clear, I personally would still hate to see someone getting DQ'd without notice. So what I would suggest is to give Latt a time limit (maybe 48 h?) to play the match or Paul will be advanced, assuming of course that Paul can play the match within the timeframe given."

After writing this Latt has at least been online, so it is not entirely accurate anymore. Anyways, hopefully both Paul and Latt can find a suitable time to play the match on Thursday, so we can forget this and move on.

Done. Luckily I found a spare few minutes to pop on the site and he happened to be there.

These tournament seedings are predicting the outcomes much more accurately than I thought they would. So far there's only really been one upset (which crushed my prediction lol).

no way

I missed completely that TH10 grabbed the normal topscore too
He is not leaving anything for anybody.

Also lol at my score in the DC being good for 1/13 aorn. I don´t expect to end up in top 3.

I have a pretty good felling about today´s DC.
Lets´s see if someone can beat me.

I was slightly surprised that I ended up second yesterday, I was not too impressed with my score. Annoying btw to finish second

Dynasty running h0t: 4 wins in 5 days. zomg.

Muahahahahahaha ship DC 42

Utterly not deserved btw
My setup was terrible
But then 5s stopped coming and suddenly it didn´t look that bad anymore.

I can't play the daily challenge today. There's no link



If I log into my other account (TC.degen) it looks normal. Anyone know what might be wrong?

Ugh, the chat seems to be having problems. We are supposed to play the semifinal now, but without chat it seems quite difficult as we can't discuss which games count for the match (= when the match starts). Also if there is a bug, no way to tell about that.

TH10,

I'm RL friends with krohn so I can text him and stuff if you want me to communicate with him for you. He's saying the same thing as you.

Would it be possible for krohn to make an account here (if he doesn't have one already), so we could communicate via this thread? Would be easier to communicate directly.

Oh, and the chat has been down for likely 90 minutes already, so not much hope it will come back online anytime soon.

Yeah he's going to do that. One sec.

Ok, thanks.

TH10, there is a game going on right now ending in 2 minutes. That takes us to about 1:20. Then a 30 second delay and another 4 minute game. How about we start our match at 1:24 (roughly)?

Or if you have gmail, I can give you my account and we can just chat there.