ughaibu: The same thing happened to me a few days ago. I messaged Fencer about it and when I logged on again the next day it had already been taken care of.

long: I forgot it was supposed to be today...and that is why I asked someone (*cough* universal eyes *cough*) on this forum to put up a reminder when Monday rolled around. Oh well, maybe next week.

rod03801: Someone should put up a reminder next Monday; I might play and I guess others might too.

It seems I am ranked number 50 in poker chips, but I am rusty. Of course that bit about being rusty might sound like a hustler, so only time will tell if I am skilled or not.

SL-Mark: The other 364 days I guess we can be intolerant.

beach: The 16th is the day we wait to see what happens after the 16th is over!!!

crosseyed: Actually I am not sure that even buying a membership will help. He is a brain rook which meant he already blew through his entire vacation days for the year since Jan 1 already. It is my understanding he won't get any more vacation days even if he buys a membership; he would have to wait until Jan 1 rolls around again to get new vacation days.

If his member ship had been a knight and then he had bought a rook then I think he would get more vacation days.

Bernice: His "weekend" days are Friday and Saturday, so he will start timing out at midnight server time, which is in close to 4 hours from now as I write this.

All of this is assuming he doesn't log in and start making moves before he times out of course....

MrDelete: It doesn't matter if it is Friday morning where your opponent is. What matters is that it Friday morning according the BrainKing time...which as it happens is also where your opponent is.

Perhaps you understood that point, perhaps not. If you are in the US and you have Fridays and Saturdays off, and it is Thursday in the US, and you run out of time on your clock, you *will* be timed out even though it is Thursday here in the US.

The rule for when your weekend day starts is BK time, or server time. If you are unsure of the time zone conversions, just log out and look at the clock on the upper right and it will tell you what day it is and what time it is in server time.

Aganju: You can check your "trash" on the events page to see if your message might be there. I am curious to see what actually happened.

Gabriel Almeida: *2* *22* ...oh crap, I am not a paying member any more. Never mind,I will leave that up anyway. https://xkcd.com/386/

ThunderGr: Actually you have to be born in the US to be President or Vice President of the country. All other elected offices you can be an immigrant.

crosseyed: In the spirit of aganju's post, I will say that I have "noticed" that publicly complaining about the dice "seems" to quickly result in getting better rolls.

Of course I may be even more paranoid than aganju....

rod03801: 16581 days 23 hours

How much is that in dog years? Heck, how much is that in human years?

I suggest having Fencer email Czuch and ask him to log in, otherwise this negative time left thing could go on for a while.

ThunderGr: Well, it may be a long time before they all move. Czuch hasn't logged in since December 2014.

Perhaps one of those players could get Fencer to email Czuch so that he logs in....

Pedro Martínez: It looks to me like you, and rod and hrqls should all have advanced to the next round based on what S-B would be if it had been calculated correctly.

furbster: It is called en passant in chess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_passant

speachless: After I made my post about not doing math, I quickly checked out who the winners of each section "should have been". If I calculated correctly, then:

Section 1 was correct. (No S-B needed).
Section 2 looks correct for who advanced, but I may have miscalculated S-B. Edit: I was wrong. See the end of my post for details.
Section 3 was very wrong. milionovej kluk, Pedro Martínez, and cardinal all tied on matches won. They all beat players 4-6 with a perfect score. They all finished 1-1 vs each other. Therefore all three of them should have advanced.

Therefore the final section should have had 5 players instead of 3. To answer someone's possibly tongue in cheek question, I don't see how it could possibly make sense to replay the final section with all 5 players, even if Fencer were inclined to find a way to do it, which I doubt he would anyway.

If Pedro wanted to he could invite each of them (and only them) to a tournament with the same time controls, but really what would be the point?

Edit* Aganju looks right, I miscalculated and Hrlqs would not have advanced to roun 2. Instead TC would have advanced because he beat both of the other players who got 3 points.

Pedro Martínez: Looks like SB wasn't calculated correctly for either section 2 or 3, but perhaps section 1 was. I am not going to do the math.

Looks like an old bug.

rod03801: If slowing down the site is a problem, there are no doubt times during a 24 hour day when there is a lot less traffic than at other times. That would be an ideal time for a "once a day" routine to run to determine mathematically definite "yellow lines" in tournaments.

I agree, even once a day would shave weeks or months (years even) off of each round starting in many tournaments.

Purple:

I think my record (for rounds played) there is something like 5 or 6 rounds in Connect6.

I don't play checkers (a notoriously drawish game for the very best players against each other), and as I'm learning right now, I don't seem to be too good at any of its variants either.

So basically I guess I am saying that their system has little downside for me with my limited game preferences there, but would be brutal for a checkers player like yourself.

Aganju: They use the system I described at IYT, but their tournament sections range from 2 to 5 players, and they don't use a tiebreaker method, so I am guessing it would be easier to calculate than it would be here....

BGBedlam: rod is correct, that is what I meant.

I guess if I phrased it differently I would say that each tournament section should receive a yellow line (or more than one yellow line when it is a tie) once it is mathematically known who won that section.

Then once all the sections have a yellow line, the next round begins, or if it is the end of the tourney, then a tourney winner is declared.

All the remaining games can continue at their own pace, without being pressured by the others to hurry up and finish.

I suppose everyone has their own idea of what needs improvement first, so I will add my one idea.

IYT has a feature that declares a winner (or tie as the case may be) in a tournament section once it is mathematically over. Once all sections have a winner, the tournament progresses to the next round.

Such a system would help speed up tournaments without having to wait for stragglers who can have no impact upon the overall results.

I believe that if BK implemented that, then there would be more satisfied players in current tournaments, and more people might start playing in tournaments, which would help BK retain players.

I have no idea how easy or hard it would be to program such a situation here, and I also know others surely have other ideas which perhaps ought to have higher priority when it comes to making improvements.

Marshmud: IYT uses "green dot" time controls for tournaments; I am not sure what they use for other games since the only games I play there are tournament games.

(i.e. they use fischer clock with fixed weekend).

ThunderGr: Oops! Wrong name. That is what I get for casually reading the posts.

I'll just leave the suggestion out there for anyone with open slots for games. Use the "waiting games" feature to find time controls you like, and use the "new game" feature to create your own open invitations.

ThunderGr,

Have you ever considered setting up game invitations for the "waiting games" list? You can set up your own time controls and other parameters, and if it is a commonly played game you are likely to get some acceptances in a day or two (or much faster).

Carpe Diem: Oops! You are right of course.

Vikings: I am going to push back on that, because at the very least it seems misleading or confusing, if not just plain wrong.

S-B is a tiebreaker system. If you win four games and tie one game, then the tournament table will say that you have "4.5 points".

There is also a column labeled "S-B". If someone else also has 4.5 points, this method will decide which of you wins the tournament, or sometimes the tournament will be a tie if both of your S-B scores are the same.

Your S-B is decided by the number of games your collective opponents have won. If you play against players A,B,C,D, and E, and player A won 3 games, and players B and C won 2 games each, and players D and E won 1 point each, then your S-B score is 9. If the player you are tied with under the "points" column has a higher S-B than you, then s/he wins the tournament at BrainKing. If you have a higher S-B, then you win the tournament. If you have the same S-B, then you both win the tournament.

One can argue that this makes sense, or not, but it is how things work here. If nothing else, everyone plays under the same system.

ThunderGr: This link is the best place to ask that question: http://brainking.com/en/Board?bc=24

beach: "Now the tourney section is a joke, you cannot find any tournaments and they stay on the list for 30 days after they start. "

Actually you can find new tournaments still, you just have to be a bit more creative in your search terms than before.

Every day when I log in (when I remember anyway!) I now visit the tournament page, and then modify the "Created in last" to 2 days (I am not sure what it means by 1 day or 2 days...is it the last 24 hours for a day, or the last Czech time zone day. Therefore I pick 2 days).

The list is usually(!) very short, and I never have to scroll to see what else is out there....

Aganju: That is not how it works. The system records the times in both of your games in your records as if the game occurs between two players in the same time zone.

Next time that an opponent of yours plays a move in a game of yours, check out the clock in the upper right of your screen and then click on that game and you will see that it was played only a few seconds earlier, regardless of which time zone your opponent was playing in.

aaru: You were robbed! Looks like someone bought a counterfeit Swiss timepiece perhaps?

Cloning Backgammon (speachless vs. aaru)
Cloning Backgammon (speachless vs. aaru)

I voted in a BrainKing poll, as I often do when they are available.

This poll was about Nascar, which I know virtually nothing about. Which means I probably (certainly?) should have voted for "Don't watch NASCAR". But I didn't. Instead I checked out the odds on some website that google gave me, and found out that Danica Patrick was only 40-1 against, and so I voted for her.

The missing subtext is that lots of people simple HATE her, despite her being a solid racer at worst. So I chose to be "that guy" who voted for her.

Sue me if you don't like it.

*edit: punctuation

speachless: 16-968.

That is the number of games where it is your turn, vs the number of games you have to play where it is your opponent's turn to play.

I thank you for your implicit attitude towards making your moves in your games. Far too many players here choose (for whatever reason) to have more games that they have to play in than they can handle in a given day, or any time period for that matter.

computeropponen: There are two ways: you can go to a player's page and invite that person directly, or you can make an open invitation to players in general here at BrainKing (with some restrictions if you want to).

For the general invitation, on the left side of the page near the top there is a category called "new game". Click it.

Then select the type of game you want to play, then pick the parameters that you want. Be careful on time controls and such so that you get what you want; there are default settings but I suspect you won't want to use those.

If someone on the "waiting games" page has an invitation that states that it is a 5 wins match and my color is black, does that mean that all of my games in that match will be black, or does it mean that my first game is black and alternate each game after that between black and white, or is it something else perhaps?

jadarite: Then perhaps you are the one who hasn't been reading carefully. Just input your move, but don't hit the "move" button until you are sure.

If you want to have multiple games where you do that at the same time, open multiple tabs (or windows) and do that in each game that you choose.

No need for any new programming whatsoever.

Pedro Martínez: Now that is a brilliant suggestion. I just removed "feature requests" from my favorite boards.

Justaminute: If there was a feature that allowed you to change a posted move, then that would be the first thing I would vote to have that abolished if given a choice.

jadarite: I just want to move my piece where it was intended.

No one is stopping you from doing so right now under the current set up. You can wait 3 minutes after making your move before hitting "submit".

To be honest if Fencer was still reading these boards he would say that it is a waste of programming time to make the proposed changes.

I would agree with him too; there are much better ways for him to modify this site for the better than changing the site for the worse because someone has poor impulse control.

Heluvagi: I haven't received any such messages from you at all, or any spam from anyone in a while anyway.

However that is not the reason for my post. You should change your BK password immediately, if you have not done so.

Also you should probably change your password for your associated email account just to be safe.

thechosen0ne: I guess I should have looked at your profile before posting. You have the automatic vacation turned on.

Imagine that you run out of time in a game that does not have a green dot (no vacation time allowed) or a red dot (no vacation time allowed; also no "weekend days" allowed). What happens is that you lose an hour of your vacation time, but all of your non-dot games also gain an hour of time left to play.

Once you run out of vacation time, then the next time you run out of time in a game you lose that game.

thechosen0ne: On the left side of the site there is a column of links.

1) Click "Settings".
2) Click the "Calendar" tab on the top of that page.
3) Check the box near the top of the calendar page. Then go to the bottom and click "save and finish".
4) Check your profile to make sure it worked.

Aganju: You are correct about vacation time. However you omitted one thing, namely that vacation time doesn't work for green dot games either in addition to red dot games not getting vacation.

Rabbits2: When you say "just changed my email", what do you mean by "just"?

There are some things here at BK that update immediately, some thing seem to update a few times a day or so, and some things update once a day.

And that doesn't count the times when BK needs a reboot because some things aren't updating when they normally would....

DeaD man WalkiN: Take the period off of the end of the link. Here:

http://www.backgammonmasters.com

SL-Mark: It is a common mistake of people who don't understand the game of backgammon very well to downplay the element of skill. Some of these people even sometimes put the word skilled in quotes, as if it is not actually worthy of the name skill.

SL-Mark: In dice games, the skill is in managing that which luck gives you. There are good ways to play what the dice give you, and there are less good ways. The more highly skilled players find the better plays more often than the less skilled players do.

I can't say why others play them, but I don't view it as destiny or fate when I win or lose; not over the long run anyway....

Universal Eyes: Wow, I never noticed that before, thanks! I wonder how many other features there are that I've never noticed at BK.

Herlock Sholmes: Yes, that is right. I agree the instructions are a bit vague.

One way to think of it is that in triple dice poker, the bonus is calculated by the score that you get if you had scored three of each number, and in triple dice poker the bonus is calculated as if you had scored four of each number.

If you think of it that way, and you realize that you only got three 6's in 6D, then you need to make up that extra 6 somewhere else, for example by getting five 5's and five 1's, or five 4's and five 2's.