Electronic Handheld has the fire till you miss...
I would like to see anti-Battleboats

When you display Tournament sign-ups at the top of our current games, please could you omit those:
a) where it is invitation only;
b) where we have already signed up?

We have a Battleboats Board which would be a great place for this discussion on the game.

Battleboats Discussion Board

Go back about 10 post in the room (Oct 25th), we currently have 4 different "variants" which some would love to see here (Bonus Battleboats, Outline Battleboats, HexBoats, and Dark Battleboats Plus)

tonyh:
a) even if it is invitation only I like to know they exist. I can allways try to ask the owner to invite me.
b) I usually use this page instead of my profile page to check up on the tournment list before it starts. But then again, being a pawn, I can only enter one tournament at a time :). Besides, when should it disappear from the list? When you sign up for all game types in the tournment? Right after you sign up for at least one game in the tournment?

pauloaguia: Right after you sign up for at least one game, because you will have looked at the remainder and taken your decision.

Vikings: It might be interesting as a handicap match, but the Nack opening position is severely behind in the race. True, the Nack position has positional compensation, but I don't think there's enough and would take the race lead any day.

If you want proof, fine. I'll BG Blitz the position and post the equities tonight.

It might also be interesting to learn backgames as well.

An initial rollout of 1080 games shows the Back position to win 56% of the time (providing equals are playing). That's about -.120 for the Nack side.

In a money game (gammons and bg's counting), the eqiuty is even worse at about -.280 for Nack.

As I stated earlier, it would be intersting as a teaching tool or as a handicap to get a weaker player to play ( I might see if I can get my boss to play ), but the Back side's race lead is a huge advantage.

ah, it seems my intuition was correct! Thanks Rex

where did the 1080 games come from?

Vikings: When conducting rollouts, you need to select an arbitrary number of games. 108 is considered to be the smallest statistically signifigant number of games to get an accurate assesment. I simply multiplied the number by 10 to get a larger sample.

whats a roll out? did you set the board up and play both sides?

Please take this discussion to the Backgammon or Nackgammon db as it has ceased to be a feature request and is now more concerned with details.

thanks for a good beginning ...
could we have errmm superpro also ? :D
i.e. only exactly five wins - 6 or 7 NOT ... ~*~

danoschek: Wait for Renju.

btw - if I remember well, many penteplayers
would like a 'pente-swap' - as suggested in
summer 2003 by d. king and a. nosovski ... ~*~

is there any plans to change the way a tournament is played , at present we have to wait for all games to complete before moving onto the next round .can/is it possible to make it so as soon as there is a clear winner from a section that they can then move to the next round ,in some cases it could save months of waiting .

Jason: Yes, later.

danoschek: No, you were right. I will fix them [swap and pro] to the exactly-five-wins rule. I wasn't aware of it before.

Yes Jason i agree that it'd be a lot better than waiting around for what can be months of time for sometimes 1 player to finish

Jason: furbster:
I agree to, but it won't be as easy as you think to implement. Sometimes the top two players are tied and through with their games and the slow person has a few games going weeks after everyone else moved 47 times in their games and this guy is on move 11. Anyway, with the S-B thingy needing to use every single person's score to determine who wins the section, you just have to wait until all the games are finished. When there's a clear cut victor that the S-B amout won't change, then by all means start the next round.
Then there's this case: 2004 Third Quarter Open Dark Chess=====
http://brainking.com/game/Tournaments?trg=4871&tri=14869
Section four has two players tied for the top spot. I've noticed that when two players have won every game against their common opponents and split their game or games between themselves they will finish with identical S-B scores regardless of what anyone else in the section does. Ol' scubabisto was the only one left with games to play four weeks ago. He's down to just two now, but it certainly would've been nice to conitinue the tournament while he's playing his games that won't change the outcome of the section at all. If I'm wrong about the S-B thingy with two players even like this and it is possible for one to outscore the other, may I ask your indulgence and say, "Nevermind" :)

Walter Montego: yes in some cases it might not make much of a difference but there are alot of times when only one player for example has won all the matches in his round so could automatically go on to play in the next round . just take a look at the first 5 in line team tournament for example ,the next round could have started along time ago because of clear winners ....slow play doesnt bother me much by the way ,its just i like to get to the next round ..instead of them popping up six months later ;)_

I think it wouldn't be that hard to implement.

1. Simply loop through all the possible results for the games yet to play (# of permutations is 3^n where n is the number of games still playing).

2. Determine the group winner for each permutation.

3. If the group winner is always the same, then award the group to that player.

In most cases it's clear cut. If someone wins every game, for instance, why are we waiting?!?!

grenv: I always forget about the brute force method. I'm just a paper and pencil kind of guy. Yes, that's an excellent idea grenv. Only so many pidgeons would fit in the holes and once the outcome could only be one way you could advance the round and fill in the blanks of the previous round or rounds as the results come in. That'd keep things moving along and all players would stll get to play their allotted games too.

ok i am not a mod .. but .. i think it would be very useful to them if they could move a post from 1 board to another board, that way people reading the boards can be sure that after a mod has been by all inappropriate posts are on the correct board

(or am i trying to be too tidy online as overcompensation for my untidyness irl ? ;))

Hrqls: Any person can already do that, or do you mean to delete from one board and move it to another? Right now I could copy your post and move it to the Gothic Chess board, but I'm not sure what the point of it would be. Why move them? Seems like telling the poster to take it to the correct board is what most moderators do and that works fairly well.

Hrqls: I don't think it's a good idea. It would annoy many people if they realize that somebody moved their posts to a board where they never wanted to post.

*nod* thats what i mean .. to move them .. that way (like on the bk board with the chess thread) the posts would be moved already and people wouldnt have to scroll through it, plus it wont have a thread started on one board, then a mod tells to move it to another board, and its continued there (most of the time without the initial posts which remain on the first board)

(and it might increase some posts on the actual gaming boards :))

Fencer: This is a perfectly normal and accepted operation in any other forum when boards/ sections are to be kept on topic.
Seems to work ok normally

Stevie: But I don't like it.

Fencer: sorry i had missed your post ... i was probably reading walters when you posted it :)
on many boards its common use to do it like this

i am mainly visiting ezboards (but also some phpboards) where i am a mod on some. i never had people complain about a move. (ezboards gives the option to leave a link in the original place of the post which leads to the place where it is moved to)

Fencer: ok .. thats a good reason :)

i have just noticed someoneone with this score 20167 lol in one of the ponds

must have got the bonus?

yes i think your right ;)

Jason: I was just talking about that in the "Run around the Pond" discussion board: http://brainking.com/game/Board?bc=1371

yes i just seen ;) ,

As I was creating new game invitations for cylinder chess, I suddenly thought it would be quite good if I could also define whether or not I want players with provisional BKR see my invitations.

What do you all think?

Fencer is it easy for you to add such a thing?

I think it would be a good addition. Dont think I would use it too much personally, but if it's easy to do it would be another "option"...

reza: 5 minutes to implement. 30 minutes to test. 8 hours to sleep because I am very tired. And then some regression tests because one database table must be modified.
But, of course, everything can be done if there is a time for it.

HAHA! I see Fencer. Thanks

I would love to see a Scrabble game here. I hve to go to other sites to get my Scrabble fix and would like to see it here.

paco: There is a fellowship called ! The SCRABBLE Fellowship ! where we play scrabble on Bug Cafe. Come and join us.

Eriisa:
is that scrabble fellowship still going? I think im in it but cant find it ROFLMBO :)
I now play one on one real time games at quadplex.com

is FLOMBOR a word?

BerniceC: http://brainking.com/game/ShowFellowship?fid=181

BIG BAD WOLF: thanks BBW...I have asked to join...Is it the same fellowship from way back when?

BerniceC: Yes.. It then became the Ladder fellowship... A few months ago, it reverted back to the scrabble fellowship..

But many are fed up with bug cafe scrabble right now because they made the descrambler feature only available to paying members.....

A descrambler for you!