lovelysharon: Depends on the settings. If it were set for something like 7/0/30, you'd have up to two months to complete the game. Make it longer by adding to the bonus.
Pason69: One thing that would hlep is to allow timed-out games to be restarted. Of course the opponent would have to agree to it. Other sites work similarly.
Another thing that might hlep is to use the Fischer clock.
nabla: What if a player is legitimately going to get backgammoned and resigns. The system would need to handle that. Or worse yet, what if a player is likely to get gammoned, but not guaranteed and resigns. How do you score that?
Hrqls: You want to roll a 1 on two consecutive rolls? Assuming it's ok to roll a pair of 1s, then your calculation of 11/36 * 11/36 (about 0.0933) is correct. So you have about a nine and one third percent chance of rolling at least one 1 on two consecutive turns.
Remember, probability (or chance) is winners divided by total. In this case, a winner is a roll containing a 1, and you were correct that there are eleven of them. There are thirty six total ways of rolling a pair of dice.
Also, when dealing with two disjoint probabilities, simply multiply them together (as you did).
Hrqls: If everyone scores at least half of a point for each game win or lose, then why not score it 0 for a loss, .5 for a win, 1.5 for a gammon and 2.5 for a backgammon (or 0, 1, 3, 5 if you want to use whole numbers). Same, thing, yes?
Also, sadly, the tournament system here is not set up for the type of tournament you describe.
I have an opponent from Turkey who is asking about auto pass. I only speak English. Can someone point me to a page in Turkish that explains what auto pass is and how to turn it on?
grenv: I agree that most of us say "good luck" when we might not really mean it, especially in backgammon, where the luck of the dice has a strong outcome on many games. Do what I do, say, "Aloha". ;-)
I suppose you could compare each player's BKR in each game to the mean and find out who has the highest weighted average above each mean, highest deviation, or something similar.
KotDB: Weigh the BKRs based on the number of games of each type played. That should give a decent BKR for all types. If a player has not played at least four (since that's what BK requires to have a rating in any game) games of each particular variant, then they would be unrated for purposes of this discussion and if they have not completed at least 25 games of each type, then they would be provisional. I'm not sure if anyone has completed enough games of all types, but perhaps someone else can look that up. ;-)
alanback: Have certain games/variants been here longer than others? More 2000+ rated players occur when there are more rated players. Look at the numbers for Espionage and it's variants. There are very few rated players, so no one is rated 2000+!
It all depends on the context. Sometimes 'a' can mean exactly one, for example, if I say, "You can join the backgammon league if you pay a membership fee" clearly 'a' means one, but if I say, "Have you ever lost a game of backgammon?" in this instance 'a' means one or more.