[fred]

Free, on Sep 27 2006, 10:32 PM, said:

Imo organizing more free money bridge tourneys would be a great improvement on short term.  At the moment, you have about 5 seconds to register or it's full, and you can wait for another hour.  Either allow more players, or organize more of these tourneys.  As far as I know there's no need for a TD in those, and people can play for free.

Or am I missing something?

Yes you are missing something.

The GIBs that supply your partner and opponents in these tournaments run on our servers. Only so many GIBs can run on each server and each additional server we add results in hundreds of extra dollars of costs for us each month.

In prinicple it would be possible to run these GIBs on the computers of the people playing in these tournaments but:

1) It would then be possible for people to cheat and one of the beauties of these tournaments is that cheating is impossible.
2) People with faster computers would have an advantage.

Besides that, we do not want to destroy the market for GIB CD-ROMs and GIB rentals on BBO. Not only do we make money from this, but our friend Matt Ginsberg, the author of GIB, has been very good to us - I would hate to see his income from GIB dry up as a result of us making it possible for anyone to use his program for free.

As you may have noticed we now have tournaments just like MBTs that offer BBO masterpoints instead of real $ prizes. The entry fee for these tournaments is only 25 cents. Not free, of course, but I suspect that anyone who can afford a computer can afford to play in a few of these tournaments each day.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[rigour6]

jikl, on Sep 27 2006, 04:41 PM, said:

After seeing the re-emergence of this thread yesterday, I decided against my better judgment to run a clocked swiss pairs. 5 2 board rounds.

In this time I made about 30 subs, blacklisted 9 people. This is why TDs choose to not run pairs. In an Indy you have far less dropouts.

Yes, this is very true in my observation. I very regularly get messages along the lines of "please sub me (or my p). They are an idiot/ beginner." Which I differentiate from "they are rude".

It is also why unfortunately:

a) I can't run very many cross-IMP tourneys. Although I actually think in some ways this is a better form of scoring, the disconnects sky-rocket when you have a swingy hand and people know they are on the wrong side of it.

b ) I always turn off the barometer, which I really hate to do because that is a FANTASTIC feature, and a real nice bonus online play has over ftf.

[jillybean]

Hmm, I have quite a different experience. I run comparatively small (max 30-40table) cross imp tournaments and have only a small number of deserters. Even fewer now that there is a language restriction, it is not uncommon now to need no subs.

In an individual I have significantly more players who exit, a large number of these occur after a bad result. Accidental disconnects where the player does not reconnect imho are rare.

If a player asks to leave I will always sub them, life goes on and interruptions happen. I can’t quite decide if the players who leave after bad result should be also free to play in my next tournament, or if I should use up time, energy and frustration trying to prevent them.

jb

[Mr. Dodgy]

Rain, on Sep 26 2006, 03:24 PM, said:

2) http://web04.bridgebase.com/tourneyhistory...=All%20Tourneys
This is a far better indicator of tourney numbers, since it presents a more comprehensive picture than your snapshot.

FWIW, which isn't much:

Taking data from the last 2 days, you will see on average, each hour:

4 MBTs
2 RRs
1 pay Pairs
3.5 pay Individuals
2 free Individuals
4 free Pairs

[rigour6]

Unfortunately, when you look in retrospect I don't think you can distinguish the "open" frees from the "closed" frees (private club, country restricted, etc).