[opaque]

These daily daylong tours have hundreds of people playing them over the 24 hour period they run? So they say to prevent cheating were not going to give everyone the same hand.
Since there's only so many points they can hand out at one tournament , Is this reasoning an excuse? Just to make more $ and cram more people into this convoluted mixture of great
hands and set up disasters? Some of the winners of these tours make dozens of points in a day? Do they just have a knack of getting lucky and drawing all the right boards? When
you get your results and you see your down in the minus 700 category and review your traveler , you can't because nobody had that hand, check with a leader and they had a nice slam
dealt to them, (top board) ... not your board? So is dealing different hands really a fair way to compete in a tournament? How to we change the format so BBO can still make money but focus on a fair "deal" .

[smerriman]

Your subject line mentions the Zenith tournament, but I think you're talking about the 'Daylong Reward - 8 random hands' tournament which is completely different and total points scoring (and doesn't even appear to be duplicate with deal pools) - at least, that's the one you just played and matches your story. Yes, these are completely luck based, in the same way that rubber bridge is luck based, but some people still enjoy that, perhaps because it gives even the worst players a chance to come out on top.

If you want a skill-based tournament, don't play the total points games.

[diana_eva]

What smariman says - the game you’re referring to is the 'Daylong Reward - 8 random hands,' which is a total points game and, as the title says, it's luck based rather than skill oriented. You get good hands, you win, you get bad hands, you lose. These games are intentionally more similar to rubber bridge, and are intended to be fun, giving every player a chance to win regardless of skill level.

If you're looking for a more skill-based tournament, I'd recommend trying our duplicate-style games, like the Zenith tournaments or any duplicate scoring game (Matchpoints, IMPs). Those formats tends to focus more on skill rather than luck.

[johnu]

 opaque, on 2024-October-28, 10:04, said:

To Smerriman, you need to do better research. Zenith is a tournament that is offered when you open daylong tours, so far as "matching my story" that's just a put down 'talking down' ruse to cover your BBO job.

Smerriman is just another BBO user like you or me who has no financial interest in BBO (and actually, I'm not sure about you). Actually Smerriman has studied and debugged GIB on his own time and has provided invaluable insight into some of the otherwise inexplicable nonsense that GIB perpetrates.

 opaque, on 2024-October-28, 10:04, said:

What I'm looking for, diana is an honest game, where pre-selected players get chosen to get the bad hands and other players get the good hands. This mystery is solved by dealing everyone the same hand in a tournament.

Nobody is "selected" to get good hands or bad hands. Everybody gets random hands which may be very good, good, average, bad, or very bad. If you're lucky, you get very good hands, or more specifically, hands where you are have a chance to get a very good score.

It's a fact that many players on BBO have created multiple IDs (or a little less likely that 2 or more players are colluding together). In a large day long tournament playing the same boards, they can play the tournament as many times as they have IDs, getting better scores each time. An honest player has no chance to win in such circumstances.

There is one competition where you can play the same set of boards as many times as you want. There's a group of players who have created their own game of trying to get 100% results on every board by psyching and making unusual plays against the robots to cause confusion and failures. That's what you'll have if the daylong and other tournaments use the same boards for everybody.

[smerriman]

 johnu, on 2024-October-28, 18:10, said:

If you're lucky, you get very good hands, or more specifically, hands where you are have a chance to get a very good score.

The more specifically bit being the key, because AKQJ-AKQ-AKQ-AKQ would be an extremely bad hand to be dealt in a daylong, despite the OP saying the winners get nice slam hands.

[mycroft]

• smerriman is not an employee of BBO (nor am I). He just passes out the information he learned earlier, as do we all (at least we try).
  
• Diana Eva is a BBO employee - and is one of the nicest people around. And you can be sure she or another member of the BBO staff have taken your frustration and logged it, even as she explains why the game we're talking about doesn't run that way.
  
• Any tournament that is allowed to be started at any time can not be "same hand". Otherwise, "mycroft2", the other account I (do not) have, would clean up - all I have to do is play the tournament twice with two different accounts. Or watch someone else play it. Or get their hand records emailed to me.
  
• You are right, any tournament where the players don't play the same hands - especially if it's scored total point rather than duplicated on the hands - isn't fair, and is very luck based. There are hundreds of tournaments every day - many put on by BBO - where everyone plays the same boards. Of course they require you to start at the same time as everyone else!
  
• That applies doubly when it's "total score". That's why duplicate is played to find the best players, and rubber by those who know who the best players are already (and think it's them).
  
• I'm sure you're missing a "not" in that sentence where "pre-selected players get the bad hands..." Having said that, I'm sure they aren't pre-selected in any way. That's what "random" means. IIRC, at least in the "duplicate-scored" Daylongs, they create pools of boards, and 16 or 32 players get that pool and score against that pool; and they have several pools running in parallel, which one is provided to you is selected at random when you start (to avoid the "double-queueing" problem). Nobody is being "pre-selected"; and you can be certain it ain't an Abominable Intelligence doing it.
  
• I'd never play a Daylong Reward game - it doesn't appeal to me. You're right, it's way too luck-based (and I get bad cards, even in best-hand tournaments). I rarely play Daylongs (but I keep meaning to remember the Sunday Forums game; I remember every month or so, and it's fun because I see the names I see here in the results. But it's also luck-based (not as much as TP hands, because at least I'm scoring Matchpoints, but still). There are still hundreds of tournaments a day for limited cost - USD5 or less, the daylongs much less - and thousands of tables of FREE bridge every day for 20 years here.

[opaque]

this is isn't a forum, please remove my comments from this thread and forum.
for your information in the above text, I joined BBO in 2008 not 2018.
for Smerriman and Johnu (advanced members) discussing a topic is not about
personally attacking the opposing views character or language it's about
discussing the experience. If they've had one, that the topic is about?

[barmar]

opaque, on 2024-October-30, 07:09, said:

for your information in the above text, I joined BBO in 2008 not 2018.

The "Joined" date here is when you started using the forum, not when you joined BBO.

Other than using the same username and password, there's no link between the forum and the bridge service.