CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

Wow, that's better distribution than I expected with the pool so small.

Edit: Oh, I bet that problem gets solved each time someone leaves or delays more than a small time before joining the waitlist again.  As long as the person they played against hops right back in, it should end up shuffling everyone if the server always matches whomever has been waiting the longest with an opponent first. I should have realized that.

I'm glad to see that, in this particular case, one of the better players came in first. 

Generally speaking, given a large enough player pool, this tournament format will more frequently be won by bad play getting lucky than by good play, on account of the fact that the most common form of bad play in gambling games is to decrease one's average results in exchange for increased variance and this format allows unlimited rebuys with no guarantee that anyone ever has to face a decent player. No particular bad player will win a tournament very often, but collectively they will win most of them if there are enough people playing.

With so few players I'm also concerned about another problem.  I'd be very interested in knowing how many unique opponents each person faced.

There's nothing wrong with the current tribute system. It works very much like a good poker rake does.

If it were changed to be up front, every game would have to last until someone busted, which can take an arbitrarily long time, especially if no tributes are coming out of the pots. Someone who simply has more time to play could just fold every round as slowly as possible and hope the other person has to leave first. Every malicious player who was ever upset about having lost a pot would simply make the game miserable for the other player.

You're trying to solve problems that aren't problems and are suggesting solutions that would make the game bad.

Edit: Just saw your edit. While taking the tribute at the end would resolve the problem of forcing the game to last until someone busts, I don't know how it is an improvement over the current system, especially considering the tribute percentage would probably have to be increased in order to maintain the same profit for the house.

Yes, much harder. The best limit hold'em bots can do pretty well, even against strong professional players, while most solid amateurs with a good grasp of the fundamentals can beat no limit bots as long as the stacks aren't too small.

As far as limits go, I think no limit was really the right choice for this game. Maybe an argument could be made for a pot-limit version (where the maximum bet is the current size of the pot), but it would really hurt the last betting round in this game, since the range of scores is so small at that point it can take some extreme bets in certain situations for play to be interesting there.  Additionally, it is being advocated here mostly in a "I want to be playing for more money but not playing for as much money" way that doesn't really make sense and suggests to me that people should be adjusting the size of the game they are playing rather than trying to get new rule options.

It's not about being unskilled. If the best player in the world is going against the second best player in the world, the smaller the smallest of the two stacks gets, the less of an advantage the better player has, so it always in the better player's best interest for the stacks to be reset.

Jason and I have both already said quite a bit about this in this thread: http://cordialminuet.com/originensemble … c.php?id=7

Nevermind, I don't think I want to talk about strategy yet.

If you can tell exactly what row someone is going to give you and can always choose whichever space you want in that row, what are you saying is the downside? Because that sounds pretty good.

Raising the antes would not be good. The smaller your starting stack at the beginning of the game relative to the amount in the pot at the beginning of the game, the less room there is for skillful play.

Winning isn't about getting all your opponent's coins, it's about making a profit over the long term, and there are other ways to do that than to have hands play out to the point where people are making enormous bets all the time. Keep in mind that even good professional poker players are happy with a win rate of 5bb/100 hands, which is like the equivalent of being up 3-4 coins total after a hundred boards. Unless you're playing against someone who is so significantly less skilled than you that it's hardly even a fair game, you should not expect to be able to maintain very high win rates (although they will probably be higher than the 6-handed poker I'm used to, since the play is heads up and should therefore end up a bit looser).

You should try lowering your expectations about the average size of pots and work on learning additional ways to profit.

I agree that the game is more beginner friendly than poker! Assuming zero beforehand knowledge, it would be much faster to get someone up to a reasonable level of play in this than it is in poker, which I think is going to be pretty cool.

I'm sorry I throw out a lot of terms and ideas that are completely foreign to most people, usually I'm trying to get across a lot of information in a small paragraph and sometimes I forget that even relatively simple poker terms are nonsense to most people (it would never even have occurred to me, for example, to define 'stack'). If I ever start writing about Cordial Minuet strategy I'll make it a point to be very careful about what I say.

I was only referring to actually dropping the sliders into position. I'm pretty sure the bug always occurs if the act of dropping a slider onto a column forces the other slider into the position you picked this one up from.