CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

A simple solution would be if someone wins copper day 1 and then gold day 6, extend the competition a day and have the day 1 copper be day 7's prize instead. This would mean a bit of a wait on the physical prize delivery, but digital prizes could still be delivered throughout the contest.

I think prompt, daily digital prize delivery during the contest will likely be good for the game's economy.

You could say "Win two coppers, trade for a silver while supplies last" and "silver and copper trade for a gold". Should work out fine as long as the digital money prize was structured so that double copper prize is less than or equal to silver prize. Just pay the winner the digital difference between the two prizes and you're not out any less when you return the copper to the pool. Problem here is the golds will likely be gobbled up early. Once they are (and later silvers), you'd have to mark those players as ineligible to win the remaining coppers.

All that said, I'm not sure if daily amulets is a great idea because of time zones, and I'm not sure if I like the idea of daily point resets. I think Josh will already have a hard enough time finding a game against an American cabal member, but that fight is pretty unavoidable.

I think what y'all are getting at is the tribute system as a whole "discourages" longer games and is in itself a different topic. The tribute system currently doesn't take a flat 10% from your winnings, instead it chips away money as the ante gets higher.

Losing is an important part of the game, and I like the way contest coins can be taken away almost as easily as they are earned. Bonus coins are interesting, but probably unnecessary. Sure, you can only gain 99 coins from one game and risk losing 100, but that's how the game treats money. You put up a game for 1.00, the most you can leave with is 1.99.

It is a little troubling that quick decisive games ending with a score of 199-0 against the cabal pay out the maximum 99 coins, whereas longer, more cautious games will pay less. But that seems mitigated by the reckless and (perhaps) unsustainable nature of winning 199-0, along with how winning two games from slow play will beat winning two and losing one from more reckless play. The top two winners here won multiple games against cabal members, so relying on a few lucky breaks likely won't be a winning strategy.

In this contest the cabal was more skilled than the average contest player, as shown by the fact that more coins were won by the cabal than lost. If similarly skilled cabal members are selected for the launch contest, they'll likely shy away from the newbie penny stakes, since they will likely be able to use their skills at the higher tables to try to net some cash for themselves.

One thing we might not have considered is a new form of the dreaded collusion. The test contest wasn't long enough for this to be a problem, but imagine this scenario: I've lost to a cabal member and now have a score of -100. Regarding the contest, I now have a very strong incentive to create a new account than to continue playing. On top of that, if I didn't create a new account I'd have to win against two cabal members to break even. Perhaps allowing for negative scores is a bad idea after all.

Careful not to get carried away guys, he is the house after all.

I'm actually super down with this solution. It solves the problems that arise with multiple accounts, slow play, and even last two hours of the contest game spamming. On a meta-level, it even solves the "No games played for more than $3" effect observed during the trial contests. The only thing left is to flesh out exactly how to score each player. "Chips won at end of game vs Jason" would be a nice metric if we want penny-stakers to stand a chance.

It'd be a personal challenge to distribute your play time to make amulets available during all time zones, but I think this is a risk we're willing to take.

EDIT:
Jason's account name should probably be kept as secret or anonymous maybe? With Canto Delirium people would probably flock to the game when there's activity on that account, but then it'd just be up to Jason to play as sporadically as he chooses.

One thing I'd be interested in: For the duration of the contest, were there any games played for stakes above $3? Is this a problem, or is the increased volume of games enough to make up for that?

<Asking both Jason and the folks who usually play $5+ stakes>

Also, JWG, you played a lot of games, what stakes were you typically playing? Since the stakes aren't revealed to the amulet player, I'd imagine $3 games wouldn't be as efficient as penny games.

I really like this idea, an amulet is surely worth more than 6 chips, even at the highest stakes.

I can't get on board with this. The amulet player is not playing with value at all, and their individual chips become worthless. 1 chip held by the amulet player has the same value as 199 chips, they don't "risk" anything and can play erratically. I think Jason is right to avoid "funny money."

Edit:
Also, on the "Amulet players play with skill, not money" front, rising stakes also fixes the unable to afford problem since amulet players will only play with winnings.

Good point on the balance dumping. The consequences of that create this rather awkward amulet farming situation for 2 accounts that I hadn't thought of, for someone who didn't want to risk the full $5:

Account 1 has say .10 and searches penny games for an amulet. When they get one, they only risk a max of about .10 for an amulet game, avoiding the $2.50 average risk. If said account loses 5 cents from a run of bad luck, the price for moving .05 from an alt "bank" account is only .0005. You could say "Account minimum balance to play amulet games is $5", but that's a nasty little clause.

If you use rising maximum I proposed, even low stakes players could rack up amulet points, as they would always have enough in their bankroll to play, so the requirement of "You've won $2 with this amulet, therefore you need $2 to play another game with this amulet" makes sense. (At least the first time they get a specific amulet, since you'll presumably have the all the winnings you've earned with the amulet you're currently holding.).

I suppose my proposal is a button that says "Risk up to $X and your amulet to gain points on this amulet" and "Drop Amulet", options for an amulet player only. X is the amount of money they've won with said amulet, rounded up to the nearest penny per game, not counting the game in which they won they first won the amulet from the opponent. When the Risk button is pressed, the game follows one of two paths:

Create game of random stake $X or less after delay of rand(0-60) seconds (Was the time delay thing already debunked? Sorry if it has.)
Join game of random stake $X or less after a delay of rand(0-60) seconds

If you don't have at least $X in your account (Which you should at least the first time you encounter a specific amulet), you won't be able to play with the amulet.

I'd assume Jason's been avoiding executive privilege for multiple reasons, some of which might be legally related in hosting such a contest. I'd also argue any player able to "game the system" deserves an amulet, as long as what they're doing isn't toxic or external to the game itself (i.e., ddos'ing the game server near the contest end or something like that). Hopefully the final rules will be setup in a way to make gaming the system a tactic nearly as difficult as actually playing the game legitimately. I suspect that extending the length of the competition beyond just a weekend would avoid someone attempting to hold on to a specific amulet through timeout abuse a lot harder, since we all have to sleep sometime.

I think it might help to look at this a bit backwards, because we keep running into a situation where a strategy that goes against the spirit of the game ends up being best for getting the amulets. If we instead determine what kind of behavior we want to reward with amulets, then it would be easier to root out bots or abuse.

From what I've gathered so far, it seems like the objective is to reward players who play often (more chances to be paired against an amulet), win often (actually win when playing for an amulet), and, seemingly most importantly, win consecutive games.

Right now I think the "Winning consecutively" category is a tall order for casual players, but still manageable. It is a bit troubling that the winning consecutively condition has a "Get an amulet" prerequisite, even with the amulets being passed around.

Edit:

I think it may be best if you were immune to losing an amulet immediately. Say, for an hour (half hour?) after you pick up an amulet you try to win as much as possible (be it dollar amount, chip count, win/loss ratio, or overall games), then after that hour your next loss or sufficient idle time gives up the amulet. That way if you have a legitimate slow strategy, you don't suffer, but at the same time it encourages playing & winning as many games as you can during the immunity period. It also makes it more exciting for new players, giving them a chance to actually hold on to the amulet for longer than a game or two.

Using the board presented, simply picking the three columns with 34, 35, and 36 for yourself and the remaining three for the opponent skewed in your favor by about 5%. And yeah, since I was assuming perfectly random I avoided Monty Hall situations (I picked random cuz it's an easy start). I just had to find all possible plays for the opponent and then add up how many times I won, how many draws, and how many times random won.

I'm currently only working with one board, so if/when I find Nash equilibrium for this board I can see if I can expand it to another board. My current guess is Nash equilibrium for this game is similar to the one in the prisoner's dilemma, in which the "best" play is actually just a "lose the least", but I could be wrong.

Edit: Missed Jason's most recent post. I'm assuming we're getting different numbers (65% vs 55%) because I'm counting draws as losses.