CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

I don't think there's such a thing as a  "unfair Elo boost". Your rating goes up and down randomly. If the system is working, then your average rating over time will be close to your true rating. If your rating happens to get knocked way up or way down by something, then it will tend to be quickly corrected.

The playerbase has some true distribution of relative ratings to each other. The total range of ratings for 99% of players may in the long term be something like 1000 points, but as long as there are sources and sinks of points, this distribution will move about relative to the ratings floor (the average rating will adjust) until the loss of points is equal to the gain, because the more players that have a rating equal to the floor, the faster the injection of points. I think that the distribution of ratings right now is way below where it will be eventually. At that point, only a small percentage of non-provisional players should have a rating equal to the floor (currently at 4 out 33, it's still very high). I'm surprised at how high the ratings of many provisional players are (they're probably genuinely that good), and the low maximum rating.

I compared the ranking of non-provisional players using the latest Elo scores to the first version (with fractional wins). Most players are within 3 places of their old rank. E.g. vegetable duty went from 3rd to 4th.

Well, OK, I'll continue investigations. Hope to post about endgames sometime. I'm revising upwards my estimate of the difficulty of writing a bot that can defeat a good human player. Pretty sure that Nate's strategy will fail miserably against a bot though

Oh, I was thinking of the case where there is a floor on the minimum possible Elo rating. That causes new or bad players with a score already equal to the floor to inject points into the system. But since you aren't doing this, so new players aren't a scores of points. Instead, they're a drain: assuming that provisional players are more likely to lose to non-provisional ones, when provisional players play non-provisional one, the provisional player will typically lose points and decrease the average Elo rating of the whole playerbase. This is on top of the drain on points when both players end with less than 100 coins.

So, given this, why are Elo scores for both provision and non-provisional players on average above 1000? It's a bug in the server. I noticed today that after winning a game that my score increased by 24 points and my opponents decreased by 8. I worked out that my opponent should have lost 24. So I picked over cm_computeNewElo and finally found the bug:

    $bS;
    if( $payoutB > $buyIn ) {
        $bS = 1;
        }
    else if( $payoutA < $buyIn ) {   <--- should be payoutB
        $bS = 0;
        }
    else {
        $bS = 0.5;
        }

After you fix this bug and recompute Elo scores, they will drop massively so that the average is below 1000. You are going to have to introduce a source of rating points into the system. (You don't want the leaderboards to claim that most players are worse than a newbie.) The most traditional is a rating floor. The floor could be either equal to the starting score or a bit below it. Because new players are going to be rapidly improving (as compared to e.g. chess players joining a score board, who already know chess) I suggest making the floor equal to the starting rating: losing your first several games says little about what your skill will be in a week. A rating floor has the advantage that points are added at the bottom, so it doesn't cause the ratings of top players to keep ballooning, though what the top ratings are will depend on the total number of active players. However because provisional players don't add to the score of non-provisional ones this will have a slower effect.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating … _deflation. Notice that it mentions another drain on points:

Unless you have a big enough source of rating points to overpower those three point drains, I think it's likely that you'll have to get rid of the drain in the situation where both players walk away with less than 100 coins, by redefining victory as ending with more coins than your opponent. That means you played better, afterall.

This is off-topic, but...

I was surprised that you said in the boxing day tournament thread that entering bots was "fine". What's the stance with bots in this game? You're fine with people running them because you have no hope of preventing them, but prefer that they don't? Or you only care about the way in which humans play/experience the game? Any difference between tournaments vs. regular games?

To be honest, I'm currently trying to analyse the game using game theory and software, and am seriously considering writing a bot for fun. I'm concerned that the game might turn out to be very easy for computer players, and you'd want to know whether that was the case early rather than later (and whether it can be 'fixed'). I don't want to scare people away from the game, though.

Ah, neat! These two new leader boards are much closer to what I was hoping for.

Let Q = R / num_games

R should be picked while taking into account the stakes that people actually play for: if everyone started playing for 10x more it should go up 10x. Computing and updating R continuously would be very messy so I'm not suggesting that, but it could be reviewed a couple times. I think the current value is fine, because even if you only play 10c games, it doesn't have much impact by the time you've played 30 or 40.

I wanted to put up a poll asking people why they didn't compete in the tournament, but the forum software doesn't allow it. Maybe someone could put one up on an external site.

I'm not clear on how this would work (but I'm not familiar with poker tournaments). Would the table stakes raises continuously or in increments? Once the size of the required stakes get large (e.g. larger than the size of the initial buy in) does it become impossible to come back from a lost game? I.e, turning into a single-elimination tournament. It would be nice if people were gradually eliminated due to persistent bad performance against the remaining pool of players rather than single bad games. However that seems to mean forcing players to play games rather than waiting for competition to be eliminated before resuming. One option would be to give a penalty for X minutes of inactivity or equivalently a bonus for starting a game.

Also, should amount of cash remaining also matter in addition to time of last game? E.g. player 1 has $13, plays a game for the required stake of $10, loses $4, and is out of the running with $9 remaining; meanwhile player 2 has only $11 but waits and begins a game a bit later for a required stake of $11, and loses it all. One would say player 1 performed better.

Actually that could be a good thing, as it encourages bad players to get out, so the good players will increasingly be playing against each other. However it will definitely decrease tournament activity. This is true for any tournament held on the main server, not just profit races.

Huh, how do you know you were playing against him? Noone was even saying anything in the chat room.

Where on earth is everyone?! Could this really be that bad a time for people to play?

Before invites were first sent out, binaries for the game used to be hosted at the more obvious http://cordialminuet.com/mildercaution/. I doubt that there's any meaning to the other anagrams.

I guess this means the game is nearly public now.

I like the idea of a weekly contest. But I think that if you're going to take an extra tribute from participating games, then they should be indicated somehow.

BTW, what happened to writing "tribute" instead of "rake"?

I can't understand why you would want to penalise people for leaving the table. I went back and looked for the thread you referred to (it's Anticlimax) but I didn't see any explanation given there. There's no good reason for leaving and recreating the game after losing 1 coin, so in practice I can't see how it would be a problem. If people don't want to play any more, then why not let them quit. I certainly want to be able to leave whenever I want. For example I've had games drag on for an hour and still be around the 90 vs 90 mark; as well as frequently wanting to play for a few minutes inbetween other tasks.

On the other hand if you're only talking about tournament play I guess nevermind.

Yes, it's not that unlikely to end with a decent score even with a 1. Plus winning with bad numbers is normal because the other player may have even worse numbers, so if the other player never folds on bad starts then there's no need for you do the same (but it might be to your advantage to do so anyway).

How would not allowing folding work? You have to allow not matching a bet/raise, otherwise there's no choice. I assume that you mean a low limit on bet sizes in the first round too.