[palabreur]

I loved the idea of the "Super Robot Challenge" run 27-29 December. It was a meta-event, in which your best masterpoint awards from five categories of robot games determined your overall score. The categories were:

Robot Duplicate (either MP or IMP)
Robot Race
Robot Reward (either $1, $5, or Random)
Bridge Bingo (either Bingo Race or Bingo Reward)
Robot Rebate 55

Here are links to the announcement and results

I would like to respectfully offer some suggestions.

(1) This is a great format, and I think people would like if it were offered more regularly. Perhaps every month?

(2) Some people (in the comments of the announcement) were concerned about cheating. Perhaps reducing the BB$ awards would allay this concern? It would also make it more reasonable to hold each month. Perhaps $5 for 1st, $4 for 2nd and 3rd, $3 for 4th-6th, $2 for 7th-10th, and $1 for 11th-20th. I think most people competing in this would not be particularly concerned by the low BB$ awards, since we (speaking on their behalf) don't have too many problems with BB$ anyway... it would be mostly a pride thing to compete in this.

(3) I think the scoring of the event should be revisited. The current method yields a lot of "maximum scores", since you can't get more than 0.80 masterpoints from a robodoop, 1.00 from robot reward, etc. Further, in order to achieve the high masterpoint totals, you have to play when lots of other people are playing, and this disadvantages people who play at odd times. Accordingly, I suggest scoring as a percentage of the score of the player who has achieved the highest score in that event. Example:

Leo's best score in robodoop MP is 81%, David's is 78%, and Christian's is 75%. Then Leo receives a score of 100% for robodoop MP, David gets 78/81 = 96.3%, Christian gets 75/81 = 92.6%.

This same style formula can be applied to every event (except bingo). In the total points tournaments, the top scorer gets 100%, and everyone else gets a percentage based on their percentage of the top score.

Bingo couldn't work this way, of course. One alternative would be to leave Bingo out. Another would be to give an artificial percentage based on the minimum number of boards you needed to complete a BINGO: 4 (the minimum) gives 100%, 5 gives 95%, 6 gives 90%, etc.

(4) The selection of tournaments ought to test a wide variety of robot bridge skill. As such, I was surprised to see robot race and robot reward as separate categories. I think a better selection would be:

Robot Duplicate (MPs)
Robot Duplicate (IMPs)
Robot Reward ($1 or $5) or Robot Race
Robot Reward (Random)
Bingo (either)

I think Robot Reward (Random) deserves its own category, since it's a very different game to the Best-Hand styles.

(5) The alternative scoring method would encourage people to continue playing even after achieving a high score. Getting the highest score is a big deal, as increases in the high score decrease everyone else's scores! It would also be feasible to run for a whole month (weekly might be better) without all of the top players scoring maximum scores in every category.

Looking forward to comments.

[barmar]

It would also be nice if there were a way to see your current totals, if you're not in the top 20.

[diana_eva]

We can show full list instead of top 20, that's not a problem.

If you like this sort of competition we can probably run them more often. We'll think about it - but surely cant offer 200 bucks as prizes regularly

For the score, Paul's suggestion wouldn't work too well. The main reason we chose max points instead of tourney result is that playing in a 2 table event it's easy to get 100%, The masterpoints reflect the size of the field, and that's important.

[palabreur]

diana_eva, on 2012-January-01, 03:36, said:

We can show full list instead of top 20, that's not a problem.

If you like this sort of competition we can probably run them more often. We'll think about it - but surely cant offer 200 bucks as prizes regularly

For the score, Paul's suggestion wouldn't work too well. The main reason we chose max points instead of tourney result is that playing in a 2 table event it's easy to get 100%, The masterpoints reflect the size of the field, and that's important.

Yeah, I had thought about that this morning. Maybe a minimum table limit for the duplicate games, like 10 tables or so?

[barmar]

palabreur, on 2012-January-01, 08:20, said:

Yeah, I had thought about that this morning. Maybe a minimum table limit for the duplicate games, like 10 tables or so?

Either way, people who play in off hours will be disadvantaged. Either the masterpoint awards will be lower, or there may be few eligible games.

[palabreur]

barmar, on 2012-January-01, 18:24, said:

Either way, people who play in off hours will be disadvantaged. Either the masterpoint awards will be lower, or there may be few eligible games.

They'd be considerably less disadvantaged under my scheme, especially when you consider that the lower the number of people playing, the more variable are the scores, and hence the higher the chance of getting an extremely high score. And it doesn't seem difficult to get a 10-player game going at all...