[jillybean]

Some free TD’s are harassing other Free TD’s not to run tournaments in “their time slot”. Last night a player was telling me he had cancelled his scheduled tourney after one of these conversations with another TD.
There is never a shortage of people wanting to play free tourneys. Fighting over time slots is insane, not to mention against the spirit and rules of BBO.

[jtfanclub]

Actually, it can get fairly nasty.

Suppose I have a tournament that starts at 9:30 and you have a tournament that starts at 9:40. Normally, people who can't find a partner for my tournament will become subs for my tournament, which is great- we always need subs, especially from people who sign up for a 7 minute a board tourney and then change their mind and quit because it's too slow.

But now, they'll try to get a partner for the 9:40 game. As a result, I won't have enough subs. It's entirely possible for your poaching to cause me to cancel my game.

Poaching is extremely rude. I'm not sure why you think it isn't. If you don't care, then you really shouldn't care when you piss people off either.

[TimG]

Are you saying that you might cancel your 9:30 game because someone else runs a 9:40 game and that game takes away your subs? If there really is FT Director tension caused by "poaching subs", I'm amazed.

[jillybean]

If you are running out of subs to the extent you have to cancel a tournament I suggest your tournaments may be way too large.

[Echognome]

I can hardly see the problem of running free tournaments at 9:30, 9:31, 9:32, etc. Who cares? Just limit the size of your tourney if you worry about subs. I mean this is a *free* tournament. What ego is involved here in running it?

[Gerardo]

Note: I used to manage td@. I stopped doing that 2 years ago. So, this is NOT official. I can make suggestions though, which may be takwn or discarded.

I think that ANY free TD who shows in any way he/she/it thinks he/she/it owns a time slot, should be ground for TD privileges removed.

This said, I think colliding is fine.

Making an effort to collide, however, is a major no-no.

[uday]

Y, the best answers are, imo, to either

1. Run survivor-movement Ts. These don't *have* to have subs
2. Run size-restricted Ts. There are advantages in capping the player-to-td ratio.

In either case, anyone that offers up grief when "their slot" is trampled upon should be reported to abuse@

One exception we make is this. sometimes we see that people use tourney rights to, for lack of a better word, stalk other TD. Example: whenever A runs a T, B runs an identical T 1 minute before A's T. When this happens we tend to take away B's tourney rights.

U

[pigpenz]

ive never had that problem, but then I dont run very many tourneys
so i tend to run them when i will be sitting at my computer while watching a football game or something like that.

but if someone was hassling me i would just ignore it and go on with the game

[jtfanclub]

sceptic, on Aug 11 2008, 11:57 AM, said:

so you would deny them the opportunity to play in a free tourney as you think you own them?


starting a free tourney 10 mins after yours is hardly a crime and I am am curious, how many tournaments have you actually cancelled through lack of subs as a percentage of the amount you run?

just for arguments sake, what time frame do you consider good manners to run a free tourney next to one of yours?

Had to cancel two of them (out of over 200). Far more of them have been delayed due to lack of subs. When you run a game at 10:30PM Central, you tend to need more subs than average. I think given a choice between having to cancel the occassional game and killing pairs because one of the partners lost connection for a couple of seconds before round change, I'll take the risk.

I have never complained to another TD about their poaching. Like I said in another thread, I just tend the bar. I would say that 10 minutes before or 15 minutes after is a good window, which doesn't count if the tourneys are substantially different. Besides, being rude isn't a crime. It's just being rude.

However, I think it's fairly clear that regularly scheduled free & open games are tolerated rather than supported by BBO. It's probably past time that we closed our games to the public and went with a private club. I'll discuss it with the tourney admins later this week. Eventually, we'll get to the point where the only open scheduled tournaments are pay ones, and people will wait for the random small tourneys so they can fill them up in a few minutes. Then everybody will be happy.

[jtfanclub]

Quote

I think you do BBO an injustice here, they have given you all the tools to do what you please, they listen to what is said and act upon it, when they can (I am sure there are good reasons when they don't) how can that be tolerance and not support

I think the words " ungrateful (can't think of an appropriate word to fit here)" springs to mind

I work two tournaments a week. I don't get paid for this. I don't get advertising revenue from the people who go onto the site to play in the tourney I direct. If I were doing the same thing for my local ACBL location I'd get paid.

Do I think that I'm providing more of a service by directing a regularly scheduled tournament twice a week, than saying "I'm bored, guess I'll run a tournament" randomly twice a week? Of course I do. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing it.

Do I think that Tracy and Linda, the people who set up my tourney, work with other scheduled tournaments to make appropriate windows, schedule directors, train new directors, keep the "pool" going so that if we need more directors for a tourney we'll have them available, keep the blacklist going, monitor suspect cheaters and blacklist them if we catch them, and so forth and so on...do I think that what they're doing is helping BBO? You'd better believe it. I don't think BBO would exist if it wasn't for efforts of people like them.

Look, I consider having free tournaments scheduled well in advance with experienced non-playing directors and blacklists to be an important part of BBO. This is done entirely by volunteers. Maybe BBO should decide whether they consider them important too.

It isn't difficult for people who want to run an unscheduled open tournament to look at the tourney list, and if a free and open tourney is about to start, wait a two minutes after it starts to create yours. It's about as difficult as waiting in line at a grocery store. If BBO wants to ban people who complain when some people aren't willing to do that, they're well within their rights. But it makes it very clear to me how much they appreciate what those complainers are doing for their site. Or, for that matter, what I do.

[matmat]

jtfanclub, on Aug 11 2008, 03:21 PM, said:

I work two tournaments a week. I don't get paid for this. I don't get advertising revenue from the people who go onto the site to play in the tourney I direct. If I were doing the same thing for my local ACBL location I'd get paid.

Do I think that I'm providing more of a service by directing a regularly scheduled tournament twice a week, than saying "I'm bored, guess I'll run a tournament" randomly twice a week? Of course I do. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing it.

oh booohoooo
do you need a tissue? the whole box maybe?

if this is such a chore why bother doing it? let other people who enjoy directing do it. in the meanwhile go get an ACBL cert so you can get paid for it or some such.

[matmat]

jtfanclub, on Aug 11 2008, 03:21 PM, said:

But it makes it very clear to me how much they appreciate what those complainers are doing for their site. Or, for that matter, what I do.

do you want a prize? perhaps a lollipop? maybe a cookie?

if people actually thought that you provide a better tournament than the other one, they'd sign up for yours rather than theirs. perhaps what you do isn't significantly (if at all) better than the other people, who just out of the blue decide to run a game, do.

[jtfanclub]

matmat, on Aug 11 2008, 05:14 PM, said:

do you want a prize? perhaps a lollipop? maybe a cookie?

if people actually thought that you provide a better tournament than the other one, they'd sign up for yours rather than theirs. perhaps what you do isn't significantly (if at all) better than the other people, who just out of the blue decide to run a game, do.

This took two replies? I'm impressed.

I'm not getting a cookie. What I'm getting is the people posting here pretending that we're just meanies for the sake of being mean, with said whiners being backed by threats by the staff. Oh, and being told that I'm just "ungrateful" for not kissing Uday's feet for having the awesome privilege of directing here.

We have several hundred people who regularly play our tournaments. We also have occassional players, many of whom find their partners by using the partnership desk. When the tournament starts, we usually have a dozen or so players still looking for partners. Many of those people become our subs. This is critical to the game, since we may have a sitout, and we almost always have a half a dozen people who have fallen asleep, or are stuck, or wandered off to somewhere else and forgotten that they had agreed to play. Out of 500 or so people, I suppose that's not a bad ratio, but it is annoying.

The problem is, if another tournament starts a few minutes after ours, these people don't become our subs. Instead, they try to get a partner for the next tournament. This means we don't have subs. So we get to spend ten minutes or more calling out to the lobby, falling behind, and spending all of our time handling dead players rather than other director issues.

Trust me, we aren't getting any lollipops. I'll settle for fewer bricks being thrown our direction.

[golfacer]

Let's approach this problem another way. What can be done to significantly reduce the number of subs needed?

1. Have some tournaments that are available only to players who have completed at least 85% or 90% (?) of their lifetime number of tournaments played. Players would be encouraged to not leave tournaments as often, and more people would be encouraged to direct tournaments since less work is required.

2. Change the idea of trying to quickly replace a missing player, in cases where the player is reasonably likely to return. Yes, there is the downside of their opponents not being able to play for 5-10 minutes, but it may be reasonable if it helps tournaments run better.

[matmat]

jtfanclub, on Aug 11 2008, 11:17 PM, said:

I'm not getting a cookie. What I'm getting is the people posting here pretending that we're just meanies for the sake of being mean, with said whiners being backed by threats by the staff. Oh, and being told that I'm just "ungrateful" for not kissing Uday's feet for having the awesome privilege of directing here.

There is no pecking order. your tournament isn't any more important or better than another free game offered by someone else.

and i still don't understand why you direct if it is so difficult for you?

[zasanya]

jtfanclub,
I appreciate what you are doing.I have TD privileges.If you ever need any assistant please call me. One piece of friendly advise.Stop justifying yourself after you have made your point.As the ancient wisdom goes "The Koel stops singing in the rainy season because frogs make too much noise."

[rigour6]

Ahhh, I see we've decided to start a flame war on this one. Sorry, I didn't bring my gas.

My own take is that having a regularly scheduled and well-run tournament is definite service to the BBO community, and should receive support. Since, as you know, the quality of free TDs is a regular punching bag anyway.

I do not and would not go to the trouble of regularly scheduling a tournament both because a) my life doesn't work like that and I'm lazy (see my previous postings ad infinitum).

When I do set up a free tourney, I do take a look at the board and make sure I'm not on top of someone else with a similar format. I don't HAVE to, of course, and I don't think people are suggesting I should have to. But it would be nice if I did. And I do, because it takes a minimum effort on my part (remember, lazy) to so do.

Also it would be nice if I limited the size of my tourneys. Which I also do.

These are things which are being suggested to be considered by other free TDs.
Fair enough.

Anyway, not a big deal, put a little water in your w(h)ine everyone.

[Gerben42]

If someone would approach me with a reasonable request, I would listen.
If someone would approach me with accusations of taking away their time, I would ignore them and go about my business. If they then turn nasty, I would put them on enemy and report them to abuse@ or td@.

[jtfanclub]

zasanya, on Aug 12 2008, 02:43 AM, said:

jtfanclub,
I appreciate what you are doing.I have TD privileges.If you ever need any assistant please call me. One piece of friendly advise.Stop justifying yourself after you have made your point.As the ancient wisdom goes "The Koel stops singing in the rainy season because frogs make too much noise."

This is good advice. I cannot promise that I will take it to heart, but I will at least take it to head.

[NickRW]

In other hobbies where clubs or similar run events throughout the year, clubs local to one another tend to co-operate so that their dates don't clash. They consult one another. Nobody owns a particular slot - it is just usually handled with a bit of consideration (well, mostly).

Nick