wow seriously...the last message posted in this board was a year ago to the day by me?? and I am posting the same message for this year
oh well, for the few hardcore pente players that actually read this here's the latest! ---------------------------------------------------------- Brf's 6th Annual St. Pat's Pente Tourney
Here we are again with another yearly installment of the much anticipated "St Patricks Day Pente Tournament"
After constantly adjusting and tweaking the Tourney Settings every year to try and improve the flow and speed, last years parameter change of "10 wins match" should not have been selected. The 2011 tourney is still ongoing due to this
improper setting for a "final match with two players."
With that key learning identified, I believe we'll use the same settings as last years format but lower the 10 wins match to something more reasonable '5' seems like a decent baseline since 3 is a bit light. With this minor change,
this years St Pat's Tourney should have the best settings yet for speed while maintaining a solid challenge to all players.
This is a prize tournament with 1 year Brain Rook awarded to the winner. The section size has been set at 7 people per section with time limits set at 2 days per move with vacation allowed.....anything more and the tourney
won't finish before the 2012 St Patty's tourney.
Do you feel you have the Pente luck of the Irish? well sign up and see how far you can make it through the Rounds! On St.Patricks Day (March 17, 2012) the tourney begins!
My thanks to all of you who continue to sign up for this tournament every year! Good luck to all of you, I look forward to playing you across the board!
Brf: Have you ever tried Connect6? It doesn't suffer from the Player 1 advantage that Pente does. But some Pente fans won't like it because there's no capturing. I like it better than Pente.
Thad: I am one of the few that disagree with this perceived P1 advantage. I lose as P1 often enough to know that if someone REALLY wants to put in the time there is usually a way to take the game away from your P1 opponent. I also tend to win a lot of games where I'm P2 also, so implying that P1 has such a sizable advantage that a players best course of action is to quit playing pente & switch to connect6 doesn't seem quite sound to me.
to each their own I suppose. Personally I've played 'te for far too long and appreciate all the subtle nuances each years worth of playing against the best players brings to the games overall evolution....it's far from played out.
pente never gets dull to me....any game without captures is another variant of go-moku to me and that kind of strategizing where stones don't ever come off the board (allowing for unplanned significant change to the playing field) does seem dull . That's just my opinion. I'm sure connect6 can be fun, but for me....captures are a must for laying another dimension of play possiblity onto the game.