[tomh42]

I just played my first daylong tournament, it was a free just declare tournament. I enjoyed it and was pleased with my performance. I wanted to check my results against some of the top ranked players and was surprised to see that they had played different boards.

Is this a bug or a feature I don't understand?

My results:

Free Just Declare Daylong (MP) - 2021-11-08
Player Board Time Result Points Score Movie Traveller
tomh42 1 12:07 4SS= 420 77.20% Movie Traveller
tomh42 2 12:13 2NS= 120 97.55% Movie Traveller
tomh42 3 12:20 3NS+1 430 50.00% Movie Traveller
tomh42 4 12:26 1NS+2 150 89.74% Movie Traveller
tomh42 5 12:32 2SSx-2 -500 54.67% Movie Traveller
tomh42 6 12:36 4SS+1 450 65.82% Movie Traveller
tomh42 7 13:13 2SS-1 -100 72.49% Movie Traveller
tomh42 8 13:19 3CS+1 130 55.34% Movie Traveller
and link:
https://webutil.brid...username=tomh42


Example player:
Free Just Declare Daylong (MP) - 2021-11-08
Player Board Time Result Points Score Movie Traveller
viltu 1 20:11 4HS= 420 94.53% Movie Traveller
viltu 2 20:12 3NS-1 -100 80.33% Movie Traveller
viltu 3 20:13 3DS+2 150 95.61% Movie Traveller
viltu 4 20:15 2HS-1 -100 52.50% Movie Traveller
viltu 5 20:16 3NS+3 690 95.75% Movie Traveller
viltu 6 20:17 3NS+1 430 68.86% Movie Traveller
viltu 7 20:18 3SS-6 -600 62.50% Movie Traveller
viltu 8 20:19 3NS+1 430 93.56% Movie Traveller
and link: https://webutil.brid...&username=viltu

[smerriman]

It's a feature. Each board is only served to a limited number of players (eg 40, depends on the type of daylong). That way you can't log in under a different username and achieve a perfect score the second time.

It means you can get appropriate comparisons for each board, though it does mean your position in the *overall* leaderboard is somewhat arbitrary - you may be served lots of flat boards where you have no hope of scoring more than 50-60%, while someone else may get the swingy ones and score 90%s.

[Huibertus]

This indeed is always the case. It is completely ridiculous.

I once had a tournament where on ALL boards I had the shared best result, and still was NOT the (joint) winner, mathematically impossible, but caused by others playing different boards with more % scoring potential. These "tournaments" just are not a tournaments at all.

[nudnikbp]

BBO has to balance the comparison feature of MP scoring with the need to minimize cheating. Unfortunately, there are a small number of players who receive gratification from cheating in order to win or place high in a tournament. BBO has to take that into account in setting the paramenters for daylong (and other) tournaments.

[Huibertus]

nudnikbp, on 2021-November-10, 08:58, said:

BBO has to balance the comparison feature of MP scoring with the need to minimize cheating. Unfortunately, there are a small number of players who receive gratification from cheating in order to win or place high in a tournament. BBO has to take that into account in setting the paramenters for daylong (and other) tournaments.

Not the solution. Ban them, Identify the culprits and automatically add "Cheater - " in front of their account name. Or whatever else seems fit.

No need to have different people in single "tournaments" play different hands, causing rankings to be meaningless. That issue is worse than the problem it is supposed to adress.

[smerriman]

Huibertus, on 2021-November-10, 12:04, said:

Not the solution. Ban them, Identify the culprits and automatically add "Cheater - " in front of their account name. Or whatever else seems fit.

How would you suggest doing that? Take any daylong tournament, and look at the top 50 people who will by definition have unusually high results. Is that because they all cheated, or simply because they were the lucky ones this time?

In the simplest case, get a friend to play the boards and send you them via email. It would be trivial to play these in a way that would get you a good score while being 100% undetectable. If applied to something like the Zenith daylong where you get $BB rewards, I could use this to play 'reasonable' bridge - standing up even to analysis of my actions - to guarantee a profit.

Would make a mockery of the whole thing.

I agree it's not ideal, but trying to identify culprits is not a better solution. This was one idea I had.

[diana_eva]

There are lots of non-daylong games where everyone plays the same boards though. This is just one type of game, but we have dozens, so maybe the features you are looking for already exist, but the game that has them is called something else. For example Instant Tournament, or Robot Duplicate.