[ArtK78]

Now that I know to use this forum to air my comments and complaints about GIB, I will air a complaint.

I mentioned in my previous post (Fun in Robot Tournaments) that I saw that a player wound up in 7NTx after an extended bidding argument with GIB. That contract was ticketed for a huge negative number and a sure zero, except that the player refused to play the hand and eventually the tournament timed out. This hand was board 11 of a 12 board tournament, so the player had 10 legitimate scores in the tournament before leaving.

I was surprised to see that this player was awarded 3rd place in the tournament with a score in excess of 68% despite not having valid scores for boards 11 and 12 (one of which was a sure zero).

Is there some minimum number of boards that must be played for a tournament score to be valid? And is the score achieved through that minimum number of boards counted as the score for the player if he or she does not complete one or more boards?

If so, I consider that to be a glitch in the system. In this case, a player was able to walk away from an in-progress tournament when he was about to achieve a terrible result. This would be a great Robot tornament strategy if a player has a good score but is heading for a bad score on board 11 or 12. He can merely refuse to play a card (assuming that he is declaring or defending) and the tournament will time out, the result will not be counted, and the score achived to that point will be the only ones counted.

In effect, the player who walks away from the tournament after completing the minimum number of boards required to be played (is it 10? 9? 8?) gets awarded the current percentage of his game for the unplayed boards.

Over a very short number of hands, one can have a truly large score. In a recent Robot tournament, I had a 90% score after 4 boards. My score stayed above 80% for several more boards, and I finished in the mid-70% for the tournament. If one can voluntarily shorten one's tournament to 9 or 10 boards, the results can be very good on occasion.

[uday]

The robot duplicate tournaments ( and their ACBL counterparts ) require that all boards be played out.

What that means is that a player that doesn't complete all the boards can't scratch.

Leaderboard from that tournament

Traveler

Uday

[ArtK78]

Thanks, Uday.

I must have confused the player who left the tournament with another player. I see at least one player who completed the first ten boards but not boards 11 and 12 on the travelers, and that player is not on the ranking list.

Another issue: Are the rankings based on the number of pairs who entered the tournament, or the number of pairs who finished the tournament? I see that the recap indicates 46 tables, and lists only 39 players in the rankings.