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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.
Well, would a non-time-limited lasting tournament be better? With rising required stakes and players being ranked in the end by the time of their last game (with the last player standing winning first place).
Then, there'd be no way for the most skilled players to avoid each other. They'd have to face each other in the end.
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.
With the profit race, if we're playing with our main-server bankrolls, wouldn't the players who don't have a chance still drop out quickly? No sense in throwing good money after bad, if I'm down to -$2 and the goal is +$5. If I can use my bankroll for other stuff post-tournament, better stop now.
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.
Last edited by .. (2014-12-28 14:36:58)
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Well, there are multiple problems with the format that we had. Good players waiting it out after gaining an advantage (and probably not playing other good players) was one problem. The other problem was that no-chance players who dropped out early stopped contributing to the tribute, making the tournament unsustainable financially. The way tournaments usually work is that the entry fees of the players who are knocked out fund the prizes of the winning players.
The idea would be to have the required stakes rise at a slow and steady rate. This is how it works in Poker, but I'm not sure of the exact formula used. This prevents players from "waiting out the clock," because if you don't play now to get a leg up now, you'll be priced out of continued play later.
For example, say the tournament fee is $5, and each player starts with $5. The stakes could go through the following progression at 20 minute intervals:
0.05
0.10
0.15
0.20
0.25
0.50
0.75
1.00
1.50
2.00
2.50
3.00
4.00
5.00
Like this for Poker:
http://www.homepokertourney.com/blinds.htm
Anyway, as you can see, they rise slowly enough that players will often get knocked out rather than priced out. But the rising price keeps them playing actively so that they will get knocked out.
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Here's an idea for a simple tournament system that meets many of your requirements (no matchmaking, no seperate wallets, no buy-in, thwarts collusion, etc):
The idea for fixing collusion is based on throwing a match (losing for your own benefit) losses are equal to or more than you gain by winning.
It uses a fixed stake sticky stake button and a time window like last time. Every match takes a rake, lets arbitrarily say 5 coins as you did this last time. The top 10 prizes are an ever growing mathmatical division of the rake take (using 4 of the 5 coins so the house keeps 1 per rake for hosting the tourney). This essentially makes the prizes a divided pot for the winners. Because you lose 10 coins everytime you collude and that only grows the pot by 8, even if the only players in the tourney were your accounts you still couldn't profit. This gives some incentive for losers to stick around as they are invested in the prize pot just by playing. People trying to game the system or heavy bankroll are just growing the pot for the skilled players.
This basically mirrors progressive slots and the lottery.
It doesn't solve the scoring issues but does at least solve others.
This also solves the problem of not having a controlled # of players entering. So even if you only had 10 players enter you'd still fund the tourney.
Last edited by mzo (2014-12-29 00:30:00)
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I did some example games of this on paper and it looked to me like if you scored players entirely on post-rake profit (meaning I could only gain $0.90 of scoring profit per match) then the more you collude with yourself the more you'll actually lose money in the tournament since the top prize is only a percentage of 4/5ths of the total rake (as the total rake is divided across the entire prize pool). The upside for non-colluding players is they still keep any profits from beating the other players so as long as they get a high enough place to cover their individual match table rakes then they get a nice bonus.
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I like the idea of the rising stakes but I can see a few potential issues:
1) What's the downside of just waiting it out for the $5 stakes? Obviously you don't get to take money from the earlier plays but you also don't risk an early dropout.
2) This is a sort of soft elimination in that you can have $0.99 left and be priced out of the $1 games then, which is ok but do you get to keep that $0.99 when the tournament is over? If not players might feel a little burned by the 20 min stakes timer.
3) Having the 20 min stakes timer means if I'm far ahead I'm going to abuse that and stretch out any game I'm not winning for the chance at eliminating my opponent from the next stake level.
4) What happens in a sitation where the profits are too spread out among participants due to elimations that a high stake level is reached that no one can play yet there are tons of people left, like if there are a ton of players with $3.01-3.99 when $4 is reached. Would it just award highest remaining? In that case I could purposely stick with my initial $5 and let everyone else wash out and potentially win without entering a single match. The more people that enter the less likely this is as all the weaker players will feed the more skilled but dilution is still a possibility, especially if I collude to start above $5.
Part of me thinks you should have to play X matches but length of matches will be pretty variable against a 20 min timer, especially if waiting for an opponent happens often (I had at least a good minute or two waiting in the last tournament).
I definitely think the no matchmaking and drop in/out style tournament makes coming up with an ideal format difficult, but a fun constraint.
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Your idea for prizes funded by the tribute is a good one. The problem is that the prizes would be pretty small that way. How many games would you have to play, and how many buy-ins would you have to risk, before the prize got big enough to be worth it?
After all, in the last 2-hour tournament with the 5-chip-each tribute, the TOTAL tribute for all tournament games was less than $4.00. That's a pretty small prize pool. Yeah, it could last longer, which would make it bigger. But for the prize pool to approach an interesting amount like $100, we're talking 25x longer or 25x more people. And there's still the drop-out problem. If you're way behind, why keep playing these high-tribute games? Better quit tournament games and go back to regular tribute games. Which means the tribute/minute would dwindle over time.
The cool thing about a tournament with an entry fee is that the fee is paid up front and can't be taken back out, so the prize pool is known at the start of the tournament.
I think many of the problems you cite with the rising stakes model are also problems with Poker tournaments. You could play slow for a long time, as long as possible, while other players are dropping out. In fact, you SHOULD do this. So what? If that's what everyone is doing, there will be a "best time" to start playing. Maybe waiting until the buy-in hits $5 is optimal, maybe a bit sooner. Or maybe playing the whole time, so that by the time the buy-in is $5, you have $25, would be better. As long as we're all playing by the same rules, it doesn't matter. "Figuring out" how to win a tournament would be an additional skill.
Which is why I'm not too keen to just adopt the Poker tournament structure---it's widely recognized that the skills that make you good at tournament Poker are DIFFERENT than the skills used in regular cash game Poker. The winner is the one who is best at tournaments.
Poker tournaments also assign you to a table where you must play. You can just fold forever, but you'll still be hit by the big and small blinds every 9 hands. You can't pick your opponent or leave a table when there's a strong opponent there. As players drop out, tables are consolidated, and it eventually gets down to the final table and then final 2 players.
Mzo, if you're interested, maybe read up on tournament poker and their problems and report back? I've got a lot of balls in the air over here.
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I can definitely see why the prizes would be small, but if you keep whatever profit you make from the matches at just the tribute cost then you'd still be making extra money at the end if you place in the tournament, because you're taking from the pot tribute. In the end its way more similar to playing normally (which I believe is what you wanted). The only thing thats much different is fixed stakes and a higher tribute that is basically just a multigame pot for the best players. That makes it just a small metagame on top of the regular one that rewards more skilled play but doesn't change the structure so much that it will change how people play much. Because the structure is very light on top of the normal game I feel like you could run this often so that even if the extra profit was small it could be profitable to do frequently.
I agree that the tournament structure can really change how people play so that it rewards the tournament skills instead, which is what my suggestion was trying to avoid. I know poker was the inspiration for the game and I worry that the differences in the two games are making things a bit more difficult.
That being said, I had been doing more research on tournament poker as I am admittedly not much of a poker player and would definitely love links and suggestions to some good resources if anyone has some.
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Another idea here:
Fixed stake timed tournament, winners chosen by same profit metric as before.
But make the tribute very large, like 50% of each player's chips.
Finally, force every table to play until the end (give all chips to remaining player when one player leaves), so a loser at a table can't punish the winner by leaving early.
So, whichever player "wins" the table breaks even. Whoever loses the table loses the whole stake.
A player with two accounts would lose as much to the rake as they transfer to their other account as a profit stat, and be further punished by table hopping to find their second account.
However, the problem of collusion still remains. Yes, they lose 50 cents every time they collude, but they push the profit on their target account up by 50 cents too, making them more likely to win the grand prize, which will likely be way more than they lost to the tribute (if not, then the prize wouldn't be worth winning).
This is also a problem with your idea above Mzo:
Because you lose 10 coins everytime you collude and that only grows the pot by 8, even if the only players in the tourney were your accounts you still couldn't profit.
Yeah, you lose 10 to grow the prize by 8, but don't forget that other players are growing the prize too. You lose 10 to give yourself an unfair chance of winning that prize, which has grown by 8N in the mean time (where N is the number of pairs of other players). If you have to win X matches to win, fair or not, then the prize would have to be worth more than 5x. But the winner is likely to lose money along the way too, so the prize would have to be even bigger.
I guess as long as the prize is less than 10x, though, we're safe from a colluder winning by collusion alone. But if we set it at 9x, a colluder would still want to collude a bit to gain an edge.
Still, the "huge tribute" version at least funds a substantial prize. It has a much bigger drop-out problem, though, because continuing to play means just breaking even even if you win each match from here on out (though winning each match would probably put you back in the running to win). Point is, losing a match hurts a ton here. People would want to cut their losses, which means the prize pool would grow really slowly at the end. Maybe this is okay, as the final few players fight for places.
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