Speedball vs Slowball

#21 mike777

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Posted 2008-January-01, 20:50

A2003, on Jan 1 2008, 07:21 PM, said:

mike777, on Jan 1 2008, 04:53 PM, said:

"Board 10-thru 12 are programed to be difficult boards to bid or play..."

NO!

I have checked and kibitzed several boards of board 11 and 12 in ACBL tournaments.
These boards creates swing in the tournament.
Players consume a lot of time in handling Board 11 either in bid or during the play and end up losing board 12 to play.
That is why the board 12 is unusual number of unfinished boards in each every tournaments.
This is observed in scoring results.
This is compared to board 3 and board 6 and board 9.

No.

The boards are not programmed differently.

In any case boards do not create swings.....the players do and yes players tend to try and create more swings on later boards.

It may just be proof that the last round the players play slower for other reasons..they simple do not care or they are tired or other......

Yes if players consume more time, they will tend to have more unplayed boards, so?

None of what you say is proof of bds 11-12 being programmed differently. It may be proof players take more swingy actions which consume more time...perhaps....

#22 hrothgar

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Posted 2008-January-02, 06:39

A2003, on Jan 1 2008, 11:13 PM, said:

Board 10-thru 12 are programed to be difficult boards to bid or play and generally seems to consume more time than the alloted for these boards.

Like other people, I'm quite skeptical about this claim

1. Correlation does not imply causation. Even if players spend more time on boards 10-12 doesn't mean that the hand generators have been tweaked to make these boards more difficult to play.

2. I have no idea how I would design a hand generator to make boards difficult to play. It sounds like a pain in the butt. I could, in theory, select boards by hand but this also requires a lot of work. Last, but not least, rigging boards is often considered an offense. I think that some players would get quite peeved if they knew that this was occurring.
In short, there is a substantial cost associated with this course of action. Conversely, I don't see any gains to offset these costs? Why would anyone want to do such a thing?

3. If you are going to make this type of accusation you really should try to back it up with some kind of statistical tests. Demonstrate that the hands dealt in set 10-12 differ in some way from hands 1-8 (the expected strength of different hands is significantly different, the expect distribution of shapes is significantly different etc)

Alderaan delenda est

#23 Al_U_Card

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Posted 2008-January-02, 10:24

The only reasonable solution is to make the speedball into the fastball with 10 boards of 6 minutes each. When I play ACBL. I prefer the speedball but when playing vs. the slomos it is frustrating to lose a couple of boards per tourney because they look at the previous hand before bidding to the next one.....to say nothing of a 30 sec. pause before passing!

The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!

#24 uday

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Posted 2008-January-02, 13:59

I'll run some trials and see if we can either slow down the speedballs a tad, or (more likely) speed up the slowballs a tad.

#25 Guest_movingon_*

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Posted 2008-January-21, 08:05

I think I only recall one time that the third board didn't pop up in a round because of time.

I do recall, however, many times, when we had 3 minutes or less to play the last board after the bidding was completed. And most of the time we get it done.

But what is frustrating is when the LAST board is not completed, not just at your table but at other tables, because not everybody seems to know that they should ask for adjustments (or perhaps their game is poor enough that they don't care if the board is adjusted). And failure to adjust boards at other tables ALSO affects the results at other tables, both on a specific board and on the final rankings.

Also, when the td DOES adjust the final board after the game is over, the adjustment does not show up in the final board by board tally.

I have noticed lately that some tds HAVE been adding a minute to the last round. It makes sense to me. One should know what the final result is when the tournament is over.

#26 Guest_movingon_*

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Posted 2008-January-21, 08:10

I really like the TD that said he tries to adjust all boards to correct results.

I also really like the idea of adding 1 or 2 minutes to the last board.

And, you know what, I agree with the poster that it seems the last board of the tournament seems to be unfinished more times than the last board of other rounds.
Then again, perhaps I just remember those circumstances more because they are more annoying/frustrating.

#27 mike777

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Posted 2008-January-21, 10:10

If anything it feels like speedball is getting slower and slower with more unfinished boards compared to several months ago.

#28 Guest_movingon_*

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Posted 2008-January-21, 20:57

Some players are indeed slow--either due to connection problems or because they are less experienced players (in my experience, the novice and intermediate players don't bid or play as fast).

perhaps we are getting more players in the speedballs, not all of whom are practiced enough at it.... Hopefully everyone will get faster.

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