You are right, of course. At the time it seemed like a good idea.

grenv: The thing to remember though, is when that tournament was created, the rules of Cloning Backgammon were slightly different. I don't remember the details, but there were more than one way to get multiple points in a game of a match. (Besides just doubling)
The rules were changed after that tourney started.

rabbitoid: Right, so people joined 4 years ago hoping to get rook membership sometime in their life.

I guess 21 point games with 5 day moves should be a clue not to enter.

grenv:
Play Cloning Gammon for a prize.

pgt: let's face it, 6 months is way too long for a tournament to last.

grenv: Three years is a bit low. I am in a tournament which has been running for almost SIX years (started 18th Nov 2005) and the first round is still not complete. There should be some way to progress this tournament, because six years is way too long for a whole tournament, let alone one round.

Aganju: I think I'm OK with the words I used, but I do see your point.

In order to implement an online turn-based tournament properly, a site needs to advance rounds when the players who will advance are determined, regardless of whether or not there are 'meaningless' games remaining, especially when those 'meaningless' games can take a significant time to complete. This site doesn't do that.

I wish it did.

Aganju: First of all, it's the world cup.. but more importantly the matches are over in 90 minutes... here they can take 3 years!

Would it be possible to get Bird's Chess? It would be nice if there was another alternative to 10x8 Chess. It's the best of the historical designs, and I am very curious to see if it is a playable game despite the unguarded pawn diagonal to the RN on the Queen side.

I wouldn't go so far to call the current implementation 'improper'.
Although I can certainly agree that it would be nice to have that feature, it is absolutely normal in real live matches to finsh group play before moving on (think about soccer world championship), and also it is not at all easy to calculate when a group is 'decided'; there are constellations where it would take significant effort. Of course a simple algorithm could probably catch 90+%, and that would do.

I would love to see tournament advancement implemented properly here at BrainKing.

happyjuggler0: oh yeah, i must have misread that somehow. Correct, this tournament should move on. There is no excuse for staying in round 1.

grenv: In section 14 one player has won all of his games. It is mathematically over.

happyjuggler0: you're right in principle of course, but in this case section 14 is undecided.

It certainly would not be difficult to calculate that a section is over prior to all games being played though.

Happy Birthday tenuki!

A minor change in the rules for someone getting a "yellow line" in their tournament section would allow round 2 to continue while at the same time allowing the slower players to continue their games. Do this and everyone is happy....

P.S. I am not involved in the tournament. I accidentally stumbled upon it when checking out the tournaments a certain player was currently playing.

alright, i would like to AGAIN request that auto-pass be enabled for Ludo. Fencer, i know you've said (way too long ago) that this will be addressed in "the next version of brainking," but that doesn't help any of us who are using the *current* version of brainking. a fix talked about and a fix applied are two different things, and i'm getting really tired of waiting for a fix to be applied for this (and i know i'm not the only one). it would be one thing if you said that and then produced the fabled "next version" two weeks later, but this has been going on for a long time now. repeatedly being summoned to game boards on which i am unable to make moves is a very real and persistent annoyance, and daydreaming of a happy (and as far as we subscribers can tell, entirely imaginary) day when i won't have to deal with that anymore really doesn't solve the problem.

thank you.

diogenysos: Please discuss it on the other board, though. Thank you

grenv: have to look at it... Nh2...

grenv: yes. correct. but i appreciate it was posted here cause i wouldnt have seen it there...

rod03801: correct... somewhat confused apparently.

grenv: I think possibly you intended this subject to be on a different board?

http://brainking.com/en/Board?bc=6

Thanks!

diogenysos: Reason I like it is that it differs from the opening in reverse at a critical point.
1.Nf3 e5
2.Ng5 f5
3. h4 c6
4. Nxh7

however since white played 1.h4 this capture is impossible and therefore a new line is needed. I think black erred with Nh2 in this game. . . white can't actually force a win i think if black plays something like b5.

grenv: nice one...

I think the opening here is worthy of analysis by anyone interested in Atomic Chess
Atomic Chess (grenv vs. Walter Montego)

Every time I go to start a new game, I have to change all the settings from the defaults to my preferred settings. This is a major pain. I would like to see a way to save my preferred default settings for time, who goes first, number of games, etc.

grenv: Do you think that's a good assumption, grenv? ;-)

Thad: I'm assuming there is already a method called timeout(gameID) or something equivalent... simply a case of calling it when the page loads if timeRemaining(gameID) <= 0

I guess I'm assuming the site is coded reasonably well already.

grenv: I agree. I thought of that half way thru what I had typed up, but didn't feel like changing it. ;-)

The rest might not be trivial if half of the code for the page is already generated, but it wouldn't be too hard to do if done right.

Aganju: No reason it couldn't timeout whenever *anyone* looks at the game... after all, it has to display the '-9' so it's already figured out the time is run out - the rest is trivial.

Thad: Agreed. What you describe it slightly more than what I thought; basically whenever any page display finds a negative time, (instead of displaying it,) it triggers 'end the game'; I meant only when the opponent opens it.
I think the latter is less effort to implement, but the former is nicer of course.

Aganju: It seems to me that BrainKing should never display a game as active if time has expired. I would almost certainly guess that the ending time of the game is what's stored in the database, so, in order to show the game page to a user, the time remaining must be calculated every time the game page is shown to the user. BrainKing should detect when the time remaining is negative and should end the game right then and there rather than show games with negative time remaining and allow users to continue to play in them.

Ever had that? I really need to leave, but I have only one hour for my move left in that game, so if I leave, I'll lose. But the opponent does not play either... so I wait and wait... finally, when his clock says -9 minutes, I leave. When I come back, I lost on time - he came, made a move (sitting on -9 minutes!) and won on time. Frustrating.

Now I understand that the timeout demon cannot be run every second (or the CPU would do nothing else), but what about this:
Whenever someone goes to a game page to make his move (and the system knows that he is the user due to move), the remaining time for him is checked, and if it's <= 0, he loses right there.
That would mean that without him opening the game, he could watch the time go to -1, -2, -3 mins, same as now, but he has already lost, the system just did not execute it yet. That would be fairer, and I think easy to do, without producing extra load on the server.

- this is my third idea in so many days; so if I bore you let me know. I thought they are all worthy. -

I find myself scrolling through 'All-Games' tournaments over and over again, tediously selecting the same 14 games I'd like to play.
It would be great if I could set a filter for that once in my settings, and then in each such tournament, I have a button 'Sign up for all *my* games'.

Idea: On the main page, where all my games are listed, it would be great to add a (sortable) column 'my remaining time' to the list of games 'Opponent's turn', where my opponent has to move.
Even though I'm not due to move on those (my opponent is), I think it is useful to see how much time I have in each game once he does move.
For example, if the lowest number showing is greater than one day, I know I do not have to use vacation for at least one day, even if my opponent moves right when I log out.

I understand that the feature is not the greatest since sliced bread, but it would probably be quite easy to implement.

7x7 Tori Shogi would be great also. The 5x5 Minishogi is a lot of fun, so perhaps another smaller version of Shogi would be good.

Is there any possibility of putting Janggi on this site?

happyjuggler0: Yeah! Maybe one of the tournaments I joined 4 years ago might make a bit of progress before I pass away (Is there some way to remove the deceased from tournaments? It seems it might be very necessary)

happyjuggler0:

yessss...

happyjuggler0: I've asked for that repeatedly.

Currently the way things are a tournament section doesn't declare a winner until every single game in that section is finished, even if the remaining games don't affect who advances and who doesn't advance.

This sometimes holds up the next round of a tournament, making it drag on much longer than necessary. I'd love to see a feature where once the winner or winners are mathematically certain, then that player (or players) get a yellow line in the tournament table, and once all sections have yellow lines, the next round can continue.

This will allow the remaining games to continue playing with putting outside pressure on them to rush through their moves prematurely, while also not making everyone else wait needlessly for them to finish.

Thanks for you consideration.

pgt: Just thought of a solution...

Play regular games and use the doubling cube in the chat window... thus keeping track of score outside the game.

Or... go to a different site. Maybe that would work as well. I may try dailygammon for backgammon and stick to dark chess et al here.

pgt: Ummmm. Hmmmmm. Ehm ehm. Mmmmm. Nope. Waste of time.

Backgammon (pgt vs. grenv)

Why should it be necessary to play for another week or more in this game when it could be easily resolved with a proper AUTOPASS feature? Come on Fencer, listen to the customers. Three years ago I promised to become a paying member again when this was implemented. Don't you want the revenue?

The game would be even better when a rule would be added: repeating the same position 3 times is a loss for white. This has been discussed before on the Tablut board, but I think it's time for an official feature request!

Black Sunshine: I'm in great shape.

Tuesday: I know after creating a tourney, you are limited to what you can later edit. Perhaps # of players is one of them. I don't recall.

Tuesday: I'm sure I've seen Fencer say many times that "No one forces anyone to pay"

(Wouldn't necessarily be MY response, but I'm not the site owner!)

As far as your question on the Tournaments board, apparently no one who read it, had an answer. I doubt that Fencer reads every single post on every single discussion board. If you wanted a direct answer from him, after not getting one there, perhaps writing to him would have worked.

I haven't set up a tourney in a very long time, but as I recall, there is some difference in what shows, over what is entered, as far as starting date/time. It has to do with the time difference. I remember it being an issue in the past when I set up tournies more frequently. It seems to me I had to adjust the time for Czech time. I don't remember exactly, personally. I may also be completely in the dark and misunderstood your question. It wasn't all that clear nor full of details/information.

grenv:
I agree those improvements should be made - but in regards to annoying smileys I would like to say that it's a fine way to communicate with people who don't speak your language.