[vico1503]

Good morning
Would it be possible for daily free tournaments to have the ranking divided by the players who played on the same boards?
I think it would give a more exact situation than the single player game mode
es.
title free just declare Daylong(IMP) -2020-06-26
Host BBO
Tables 12600
Boards

cordial greetings

VICO1503

[smerriman]

Not possible, because nobody plays the same set of boards.

[vico1503]

if you play with different boards, what does the classification mean?

[Vampyr]

vico1503, on 2020-July-22, 07:09, said:

if you play with different boards, what does the classification mean?

Nothing. I find it an incomprehensible format.

[johnu]

There is a lot of luck involved because players are playing different boards. I've played sessions where the maximum score for 3 or 4 boards is in the low 50% range for MP and close to 0 IMPs for IMP games because there is no way to get more or less tricks unless you misclick or do something completely silly.

Or you may have a high percentage of boards that require great guessing and/or great declarer play where you have a chance to get close to 100% for those boards.

The best you can do is look at the board results at other tables for the boards you played and see where you could have improved.

[pilowsky]

The reason luck is involved is that you may be in a group that gets more 'flat boards' than other people. This decreases your opportunity to achieve high percentages.
Here is an example from today.
The winner of the Daylong scored extremely well with 2 100% boards. The first one is a makeable slam in hearts or spades but only makes 2NT!. Nobody else made this contract. The other time they found a makeable 3NT that nobody else found. Good luck to them.

Meanwhile, I played in a group where I shared top board for 54.55% with 21 others. 2 people not making.

The normalisation of scores with small sample sizes is commonly done to ensure that groups are compared fairly across candidatures. That way, people undertaking Advanced Calculus get fairly compared with those taking History.
The mathematics behind this is designed to enable everyone to enjoy whatever course they like - or in this case, play different sets of boards, without being disadvantaged in the end.

Unfortunately, BBO does not undertake any normalisation for massive daylong tournaments. As johnu and smerriman point out, this means that there is a great deal of luck involved. On the other hand, they are FREE. Which is quite cheap. You can get a sense of how well you did within your group by looking at your modal position for each board.

This means did you score at, above or below the commonest result for that hand.

Some, like Vampyr dislike the format. I quite like it. The robots have a (mostly) knowable system, and when a mistake is made, I have to own it.

[vico1503]

but I can't find the other players in my group. how do I find them? do I have to scroll through the rankings and check one by one those who played with my own cards?
regards

[hrothgar]

vico1503, on 2020-July-23, 10:21, said:

but I can't find the other players in my group. how do I find them? do I have to scroll through the rankings and check one by one those who played with my own cards?
regards

I don't think that you share a group across large numbers of boards.

I could be wrong, but I believe that you share group 1 with some large number of players and then group 2 with some different large number of players

[Vampyr]

An event where no one shares a field or opponents with anyone else cannot have meaningful scores, but if you enjoy playing with robots it might be fun.

[barmar]

Vampyr, on 2020-July-23, 10:49, said:

An event where no one shares a field or opponents with anyone else cannot have meaningful scores, but if you enjoy playing with robots it might be fun.

The way to think of it is "Were you playing well in general during that session". The hope is that by playing enough boards, the random factors of being in different fields on each board evens out. And it's also very unlikely that any player would get a large number of swingy or flat boards.

That's why the NABC Robot Individual, which is the premier robot game, has so many boards.

You can also make an analogy with physical sports. Consider a tennis tournament. Some of the matches will be played on windy days, some on calm days. Yet no one complains that it's unfair to consider both matches equally.

And coming at it from another direction: do you have a better idea of how to prevent rampant cheating in these games? If everyone played the same boards, all you'd have to do is play it twice with different usernames. Or collude with a player who plays it first and gives you all the hands. The system we use was the best idea we could come up with to make them cheat-proof.

[smerriman]

barmar, on 2020-July-23, 14:00, said:

You can also make an analogy with physical sports. Consider a tennis tournament. Some of the matches will be played on windy days, some on calm days. Yet no one complains that it's unfair to consider both matches equally.

I don't really see how that's similar, since you still have the ability to win your game.

This is more likely saying your game rained out, and since you didn't play, you're not longer able to win the tournament.

barmar, on 2020-July-23, 14:00, said:

And coming at it from another direction: do you have a better idea of how to prevent rampant cheating in these games? If everyone played the same boards, all you'd have to do is play it twice with different usernames. Or collude with a player who plays it first and gives you all the hands. The system we use was the best idea we could come up with to make them cheat-proof.

Well, I did have one idea which nullified the number of swingy hands you were dealt

[johnu]

smerriman, on 2020-July-23, 14:38, said:

I don't really see how that's similar, since you still have the ability to win your game.

This is more likely saying your game rained out, and since you didn't play, you're not longer able to win the tournament.

There are better examples. One is professional golf. In full field tournaments, on Thursday and Friday players are divided into morning and afternoon groups. They switch between morning and afternoon starting times each day. Sometimes it can be extremely windy in either the morning or afternoon on one day. That can cause the average score to vary by 3 or 4+ shots per round depending on your tee times. You might miss the 36 hole cut because you played in bad weather, or if your were one of the favorites, be too far back to place high.

Or, World Cup skiing where there are 2 runs. The 2nd run, the top skiers start in reverse order so the best time starts last. Sometimes the weather gets too warm and the snow/ice really starts melting so by the time the last top skiers start the course is barely skiable and they last group has terrible times.

[Vampyr]

barmar, on 2020-July-23, 14:00, said:

And coming at it from another direction: do you have a better idea of how to prevent rampant cheating in these games?

Well, not having them in the first place is would be a start.

Otherwise... I don’t know how many people play in these events, but f there are a lot, you could change half of the boards every half hour; best would be to change it for each player when they have completed half the session. Then people could actually see the travellers, which is what they seem to want — and the window for cheating would be very small. The overall scores would still mean nothing, but there is no solution for that, well not that I can think of anyway.

If you have a really large number of people, say 1000+ (yes I realise this is unrealistic, but in theory...) you could have 50 complete sets and distribute them randomly. Someone trying to cheat will be very unlikely to be successful. Obviously a few would manage it, but it should be a small enough number that BBO’s anti-cheating algorithm would catch most of them.

EDIT: l thought that the daylongs were robot tournaments, but I just had a look and all of the ones listed were individuals. It doesn’t make a difference to anything I have said above.

[smerriman]

Vampyr, it's probably worth having at least the faintest idea of what these tournaments are, before commenting on how to improve them. If you think 1000+ entrants is unrealistic, you may want to consider that the most recent tournament had 16000 entrants. I would hazard a guess this makes them popular enough that removing them entirely may not be a worthwhile suggestion.

Your first option makes no sense with the format (a single player can take 24 hours between starting and finishing the tournament).

And cheating was exactly the reason the second was avoided; even with 50 complete sets the birthday paradox means you only need to play a small number before coming across a duplicate. And a 'BBO anti-cheating mechanism' does not exist for these types of tournaments, other than the one being discussed.

[Vampyr]

smerriman, on 2020-July-23, 20:07, said:

Vampyr, it's probably worth having at least the faintest idea of what these tournaments are, before commenting on how to improve them. If you think 1000+ entrants is unrealistic, you may want to consider that the most recent tournament had 16000 entrants. I would hazard a guess this makes them popular enough that removing them entirely may not be a worthwhile suggestion.

Your first option makes no sense with the format (a single player can take 24 hours between starting and finishing the tournament).

And cheating was exactly the reason the second was avoided; even with 50 complete sets the birthday paradox means you only need to play a small number before coming across a duplicate. And there is simply no 'anti-cheating' mechanism in place that can handle these sorts of tournaments.

If there are 16,000 entrants, shared board sets or half sets could be numerous enough that finding a duplicate would be very unlikely. In fact you could simply have a new set for everyone who entered in a minute or even less. Simple. You mention that a player could take 24 hours, but no one would get their boards anymore. And to make it even more secure, if someone has not started a new board within, say, 15 minutes they would get a different set. Just in case two people or two IDs for one person logged in at the exact same time.

You could even have many sets distributed every minute, so getting two the same would be very unlikely.

[sfi]

Vampyr, on 2020-July-23, 20:19, said:

And to make it even more secure, if someone has not started a new board within, say, 15 minutes they would get a different set. Just in case two people or two IDs for one person logged in at the exact same time.

You could even have many sets distributed every minute, so getting two the same would be very unlikely.

You would need the last condition. Otherwise I could simply start at the same time with two IDs and play the first one very quickly. At normal pace I manage about a hand a minute against the robots, and if I really wanted to I could simply throw the hands (open 7nt, concede) and finish the entire set within a minute. All this would be within normal time variation. And now I could play the second set at my leisure with full double dummy knowledge.

The real question is whether you treat these large tournaments as serious events or a bit of fun. Taking the first approach leads to frustration and easy identification of lots of holes in integrity of results. They are somewhat random, but that means everyone has chances to do well. Which keeps lots of people coming back.

[smerriman]

Vampyr, on 2020-July-23, 20:19, said:

If there are 16,000 entrants, shared board sets or half sets could be numerous enough that finding a duplicate would be very unlikely. In fact you could simply have a new set for everyone who entered in a minute or even less. Simple. You mention that a player could take 24 hours, but no one would get their boards anymore. And to make it even more secure, if someone has not started a new board within, say, 15 minutes they would get a different set. Just in case two people or two IDs for one person logged in at the exact same time.

You could even have many sets distributed every minute, so getting two the same would be very unlikely.

I'm not following this at all. If you have as many sets as you're suggesting, then you'll have virtually nobody to compare your scores to, which makes things even worse. And if someone takes longer than 15 minutes to play their 8 hands, they end up playing multiple sets, resulting in the original problem of being compared against different groups of people, but with even more variation thrown in due to less comparisons?

The whole point of daylong is the ability to come and go, rather than it being 1440*something independent 15 minute tournaments.

[Vampyr]

smerriman, on 2020-July-23, 20:59, said:

I'm not following this at all. If you have as many sets as you're suggesting, then you'll have virtually nobody to compare your scores to, which makes things even worse. And if someone takes longer than 15 minutes to play their 8 hands, they end up playing multiple sets, resulting in the original problem of being compared against different groups of people, but with even more variation thrown in due to less comparisons?

The whole point of daylong is the ability to come and go, rather than it being 1440*something independent 15 minute tournaments.

I think that 15 minutes is more than enough time to play a hand. I am not sure why you think that at least one out of 8 boards will take 15 minutes or longer. I think that most people would choose to play 8 boards at a sitting. Those who choose to “come and go” will not have the same advantage of comparisons.

With 16000 entrants you could have 500 board-sets and still get plenty of comparisons. They could even be given out randomly during the day; I think there are enough now that finding the same one again would be highly unlikely.

I suppose the simplest thing is simply to make the travellers for each board available.

[smerriman]

Vampyr, on 2020-July-23, 22:05, said:

I think that 15 minutes is more than enough time to play a hand. I am not sure why you think that at least one out of 8 boards will take 15 minutes or longer. I think that most people would choose to play 8 boards at a sitting. Those who choose to “come and go” will not have the same advantage of comparisons.

I misread and thought you meant that if you hadn't completed the full set within 15 minutes you change sets. I'd think it's quite common for people to play a few hands at a time though, I've done that regularly in the past. Not sure you'd want to disadvantage people for taking their time.

Vampyr, on 2020-July-23, 22:05, said:

With 16000 entrants you could have 500 board-sets and still get plenty of comparisons. They could even be given out randomly during the day; I think there are enough now that finding the same one again would be highly unlikely.

I guess that's true; with 500 sets you'd need to play on average about 28 tournaments to get a duplicate. Though despite the current issues I suspect there'd be far more complaints when people end with a rank out of 30 players in a 16000-wide tournament.

Vampyr, on 2020-July-23, 22:05, said:

I suppose the simplest thing is simply to make the travellers for each board available.

They already are - that part works perfectly fine.

[Gerardo]

For Daylongs, travellers show all the different results for a given board, with a sample movie and a frequency, not each individual result.

Vampyr, I don't follow your objections. Once you have different sets of boards for different people as a condition, what's wrong with the way is currently done?