New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-01 20:23:11

The goal is to have a tournament hosted in situ on the main server without too much fragile structure. Pretty much a free-for-all of some kind, where winners are determined after a reasonable amount of time.

A few challenges:

1. Funding the prize pool. The normal house tribute is so small that thousands of games would need to be played to fund reasonable prizes.

2. Players setting up dummy accounts to collude against, beat easily, and increase their ranking in the tournament (for score-based tournaments).

3. Players waiting to join until the very end to increase their chances of winning first place (for knock-out tournaments).

I think I've come up with something that solves these problems.

First, the prize pool could be funded by making every tournament table winner-take-all (you leave the table, you lose your stake), and setting the house tribute at a flat 50% per table (so the winner walks away even, the loser or leaver walks away with 0). The loser's half of the buy-in would go into the prize pool. If the tournament stake level is X, and G games are played total, the prize pool would be G * X. Finally, the winners of each table would have "free" money to use to play additional opponents (they get their money back by winning a table). I.e., loser's stakes fund the prize pool.

Second, to eliminate re-buys, the tournament could be single elimination (or maybe we could set it to a limit of Y eliminations). You lose a table, and you're out---the server simply blocks you from joining another tournament-flagged table this tournament.

With this structure, we could have a nice last-player standing mechanism, along with potentially ranking player tiers based on how many games you won before being knocked out.

Third, to deal with the problem of weird player orderings (you've won two games, get paired with a player who has won three games, and you win, so now you and that player are tied in terms of won games, but they're knocked out, and there's no one left to play) and also playing against dummy accounts to stay in and rack up your win count, a we can add a scoring system on top of this.

Essentially, players could be ranked by a separate, tournament-only Elo that starts at 1000. When you lose, your tournament Elo goes down, and then you're knocked out. The knock-out is important to prevent weaker players from throwing money at the tournament to harass the top player with last-minute challenges long after the tournament should be over.

Thus, who you beat, and how many people you beat, matters. Latecomers are penalized by starting back at 1000 while all the earlier players are higher. Colluders get less and less of an Elo boost from each dummy 1000 account they play against. We start expecting them to beat 1000 accounts, while the top legit player will have a much higher Elo from playing other legit players who are also rising up. So, even if the colluder finally faces and defeats the top player, the top player will still have higher tournament Elo in the end.

Instead of a time limit, the tournament could run until last-player-standing, with an inactivity timeout in place to automatically eliminate players who are dragging things out (if you're not waiting for a game or in a game for X minutes, you're out and get docked Elo as if you lost against the lowest Elo player who is still in).

With this knock-out structure, the prize pool equals the buy-in times one less than the number of players. 21 players at $5 each makes a $100 prize pool. Winner takes half, second takes a quarter, third takes an eighth,

If we allow rebuys (double or triple elimination) then obviously the prize pool could be larger.

Are there any holes in this idea?

jere · 2015-01-01 21:38:06

Sounds interesting. My initial concern is that you can't freely leave a table without falling behind AND you get kicked from tables too with a hefty Elo penalty. Ok, I get it. You're punishing people who are dragging things out, but what if you get matched up with someone who drags the game out. Talk about bad luck. Imagine someone who folds after every first betting round (a best case). They could drag out a game to 3 hours and there's absolutely nothing you can do in response. In the last format, you could always leave a slow game.

If these stakes appear alongside normal games, you should really considering highlighting them as being part of a tournament. With 50% rake and losing everything if you leave, it would really come as a shock to someone stumbling into a tournament game.

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-01 22:49:55

Oh, I didn't mean you get kicked from the tournament if a game lasts longer than X minutes.

I meant, if you're not waiting for a game AND you're not playing a game, and you go longer than X minutes with no tournament activity, you are kicked. So you can't walk away from your computer during the tournament and make everyone wait. If you're in a game, you're in a game.

But yeah, locking people into a table with a slow player is a huge problem. Especially if you play 1 game while everyone else gets in 5 games... yikes. Hmm....

What about rising antes at each table? Antes go up by one chip each round. Not ideal, because it changes the game. How else can you prevent people from playing as slow (bet wise) as the game allows? Obviously, they're not going to win the tournament either, but they sure can bog you down with them.

How long can they drag it out? 1 min first pick, one minute first bet, one minute first fold. Three minutes per chip, 100 chips... 5 hours!!!

So even if we set it up to make everyone else wait until all first round matches are finished, 5 hours won't do.

Ah!!! time limited matches. Your match lasts 5 minutes, and whoever has the most chips left at the end wins the match, takes half the total chips (rest goes to prize pool), and continues.

And yes, I'd release v12 of the client which would support special marking for tournament stakes---maybe even a confirmation page explaining the extra tribute. I suppose the client would have to show the match time limit too, if that was the solution.

computermouth · 2015-01-02 02:42:12

Whole thing sounds great! Maybe a tiny issue with the time limit. If 100 chips can make 5 hours, making 5 minutes would only be a two chip loss - worst case scenario for our slow cheeser. Battleplan: get three chips up > wait it out > win tourney > be hero. Would it be possible for something like

I wrote:

tourneyElo += gainedElo*(1+percentChipLead)

Last edited by computermouth (2015-01-02 02:44:06)

.. · 2015-01-02 14:33:52

I didn't understand much of the description. It seems complicated. (Sorry if the rest of this is way off.) What's the winning criterion? Elo rank? Last man standing? Elimination after Y losses, where different players complete games at different rates, implies that the number of games you win has no consequence. But it sounds like you mean that Elo rank is the winning criterion, and the last-man-standing system is mainly just a consequence of the 50% tribute. If you get a penalty to your Elo rank when you're eliminated from the tournament, and that penalty decreases over time, that sounds to be equivalent to "bonus points for lasting a long time". Which means that drawing out your games until the time limit could still be beneficial. Also, I don't see that what you described actually causes the Elo elimination penalty to actually decrease over time. "Lowest Elo rating of any remaining player" can move up and down.

Honestly, single elimination doesn't sound too appealing to me. Half of competitors would play a single game and get kicked out? There's still a lot of luck involved in this game, and besides, single elimination is an objectively bad system for determining the top 3 places. Tournaments aren't just about prize money. It's also about being at the same place/time that everyone else turns up for guaranteed serious, tense, play. I would hope to be able to play a series of games over, say, an hour. I guess you want to avoid that people stop playing games once they no longer have a hope of winning and thereby stop contributing to the prize. But I don't see a way to avoid that without an upfront entrance fee. On the other hand having a lower upfront commitment (a fraction of the maximum/total entrance fee) could also attract more players. Maybe tournaments just aren't what I'm looking for.

Last edited by .. (2015-01-02 14:36:52)

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-03 02:25:47

Yeah, would be nice to have players continue playing (swiss style).

No, the Elo hit for getting kicked was only if you were not playing anymore after winning some (i.e., you hadn't already been kicked for losing).

The idea is that prizes would be determined by final Elo alone. If you get knocked out early, your Elo gets frozen after your last game (the one you lost).

It seems like if the winners were determined by Tournament Elo alone, people could keep playing even after losing.

I'm just trying to figure out the entrance fee part. The tournament really needs something like an entrance fee to actually work. But how would that fit with the existing client?

PersonGuy · 2015-01-03 04:14:18

What if it was:
- Fixed buy in (say $2) where all buy ins are done before a specific date/time and on accounts with more than X games
- All tourney winnings are kept in a separate pool from your standard balance (until the end)
- Winner take all (that's my favorite part of your proposal)
- BUT each game can start with uneven chip distribution

So, if player A built their tourney pool up to $12 plays against player B with $8, player A would start that game with 120 chips and player B would start with 80 chips. So you still get eliminations and players who win more games will generally have an advantage against player's who've won less. With fixed buy in period all players are known from the start and you always know how many remain.

Last edited by PersonGuy (2015-01-03 04:15:59)

AnoHito · 2015-01-03 12:54:04

The time limit thing may still be problematic if a player decided to stall the game as soon as they had the lead. At least that's what I would do...

I say just have a fixed buy-in when you play your first tournament match with a warning screen to prevent players from accidentally buying into the tournament. I would also add a rule that doesn't allow you to play against the same person twice. This both discourages collusion (because the advantage you gain from colluding is offset by cost of the buy-in), and discourages running from matches (because once you run you will not have a chance to play the person again, lowering your potential winnings). That might actually make things really interesting because whenever you played against someone, you would have to weigh the risks of continuing to play them against the cost of leaving the match early.

That being said, it would still be possible to exploit this system with collusion. It would just require you to put up a bit more money at the start. But this is true of literally every non-bracketed tournament structure I can think of. You might be able to police things though, by carefully examining the winner's match records and looking for any signs of suspicious activity. The signs would be fairly obvious in most cases. For example, if someone was obviously throwing matches to another player, or if someone was playing against only players with no other match records, or if someone played most of their matches against new accounts (or accounts that hadn't been used much outside of tournaments), or if someone conveniently managed to play against the same set of other players and won in multiple different tournaments. There is no perfect solution to catch someone who is cheating, but if you police things as well as you can, you can at least make it very difficult to get away with.

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-03 20:12:27

Good thoughts here!

Winner-take-all at a given table is a problem because of potential stalling on either player's part. The winner could stall to trick the loser into leaving, the loser could stall to harass the winner too.

Mixing all this together, I think THIS will actually work:

A separate tournament entry fee that shows up in the client on the game list, marked with a special color and confirmation screen. Suppose this is $5. It doesn't buy you into a table, but buys you access to the tournament. That money is gone, and used to fund the prize pool.

After you pay this entry fee, a special tournament match will be visible in your game list, again in a special color. This will be a fixed stake, maybe 10% of the tournament fee. I thought about making this always 0.01, or even free, but I don't want people to play carelessly and change their play style, so something has to be at stake in every game. So, say it's 0.50.

These games work EXACTLY like the normal game. Same tribute, same starting coins, same rules, same effect of leaving early, winner takes what winner takes, and most importantly, same effect on Elo as the main game.

Finally, each player has a special tournament-only Elo that starts at 1000 at the start of the tournament, has no floor, and goes up when you win and down win you lose according to the normal formula (scaled by number of chips transferred, just like normal).

After the tournament ends (suppose it runs for 2 hours), players are ranked by their tournament Elo and awarded prizes from the prize pool. 50% for first place, 25% for second, or whatever scheme we can dream up.

Elo is the trick that thwarts collusion or late-joining, because it can't be manipulated very much by playing dummy accounts, and you can't just come in at the end, beat the leader once, and win the whole thing. The higher you go, the less your Elo gets boosted by beating a dummy account. As long as you can't get into prize territory by doing this, we're good. I think using the same provisional Elo thing, where your first X games don't change the Elo of the other player if the other player is established, would help here. You'd need so many dummy accounts that the entry fees would trump the prize.

A bracket would be great, but the problem is fragility. Say you're assigned to play someone, but they don't show up. What do we do with you? Also, everyone must join ahead of time, etc.

Maybe some kind of flexible Elo bracketing, where you get blocked from playing players who have Elo that is much lower than yours, especially playing against people who are 1000 and lower after you have won some. That would end simple dummy accounts right there (though you could have dummy accounts play each other to boost the Elo of one back up).

The problem with preventing match-ups using any mechanism is that by the end, a bunch of players would be sitting around and waiting. Also, it would prevent legit players from coming back by beating the leader (they could be blocked from playing the leader due to Elo).

Playing each player only once is interesting... but still problematic if your final play partner disappears (you get one less game than everyone else). But maybe this makes sense.... Still, at the very end, you'll be sitting there waiting for you final partner to get out of their match.

mzo · 2015-01-03 22:10:49

I like it. Simple entry fee, fixed stakes, play is the same, and ELO is a sort of score based bracketing. I still wish there was a better solution than time limit, like X matches played.

PersonGuy · 2015-01-04 00:55:46

Your new proposal sounds great. One question, would the fixed stake tables be funded out of your normal balance separate from the entry fee?

Last edited by PersonGuy (2015-01-04 00:56:14)

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-04 01:29:26

Yeah, time limit isn't perfect, but X matches played could allow one player to make everyone else wait.

PersonGuy: the fixed stake tables would come out of your balance, separate from the entry fee. Thus, you could win/lose money at tables just like normal, with the entry fee going toward the prize pool only.

jere · 2015-01-04 02:43:47

Very solid solution. I wonder if Elo has ever been used this way in other games/tournaments.

I think using the same provisional Elo thing, where your first X games don't change the Elo of the other player if the other player is established, would help here. You'd need so many dummy accounts that the entry fees would trump the prize.

Hmmm, here's my gut reaction on how this could be broken. I assume X would have to be something like 5 (most people played less than 10 games in the last tournament).

Make three accounts: Alice, Bob, Chuck. Alice joins the stakes hoping no one else is waiting. If someone is waiting, Alice leaves immediately. Otherwise, Bob joins and wins all the coins for a fairly large Elo gain.

Rinse, repeat 5 times. The Elo siphoning between the two drops off a bit, but still gives a boost to Bob. You do this whole thing again between Bob and Chuck. This time Chuck wins all the coins and Bob's Elo doesn't drop off for the first 5 games (he's established and Chuck isn't).

The leaving shouldn't be too much of an Elo/$ hit, because you're only losing one coin. No more 5 coin starting rake.

I did some calculations and it looks like within those 10 games (ignoring leaving costs) Bob gets to 1107 and Chuck piggybacks off that score to 1174. As a baseline comparison, an honest player matching up against a line up of players with 1000 Elo ends up at 1181 in the course of 10 games in which they win 100% of the pot. And that's rather optimistic for the honest player. I won the boxing day tournament by profiting roughly 3 table stakes (way below 10). Another point of reference is that on the current Elo boards all but 3 players are below 170 (analogous to 1170, right) and they've had weeks to get there.

The cheaters do have to contend with finding each other, but their "games" are extremely fast. $15 for a ~ $50 prize .... well hopefully a huge turnout inflates that.

I think the Elo bracketing would help solve this situation. Sorry for the rambling...

Last edited by jere (2015-01-04 02:58:11)

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-04 22:26:52

Yeah, I was worried about this too. Thanks for pushing the math through on an example. It's true that a cheater could play 1000s of games against a dummy account very quickly and push their Elo up as high as they want to.

So... what about "you can't play the same person twice?" As in, after you play them once, they disappear from your pool and you simply can't join a game with them.

Then to give yourself X fake Elo boosts, you'd need X dummy accounts playing in the tournament and X buy-ins.

This would involve a lot of waiting for match-ups toward the end, which would be frustrating as things are heating up at the end, but maybe it's the only way.

This would effectively be a kind of ad-hoc bracket, but one where the loser would still have a chance to play the winner at the very end.

There's another problem here with leaving games early, which penalizes yourself (no big Elo boost from this opponent), but punishes your opponent too (if they were going to win anyway, you'd want to leave early to limit your Elo loss and limit their gain). Also, slow play used to harass because each game is so valuable as a one-time deal.

Maybe there can be some kind of total limit on the amount of Elo you can get from one opponent, equal to the 1000 vs 1000 Elo boost if one player sweeps the table. So, if a game ends early with little Elo boost, you could play that player again later and get more Elo from them.

But you couldn't siphon one dummy account for Elo over and over.

And you could simply be blocked from seeing players that you've already won too much Elo from. Like.... "no, we already KNOW you can win against them a lot, play against someone else instead."

jere · 2015-01-05 00:05:55

The game limit sounds like the best option. Maybe 2 games instead of just 1 because you expect some variance in how often you encounter people. I dunno. Either way, that makes the dummy account approach very costly.

At first an Elo cap sounded as good, but two equally skilled players could fluctuate around the same Elo for a while (and they might rejoin often because they exit at the same time). If it was near the end, that would be good I suppose. The top 2 players should be fighting for the top spot. But if those same two players met each other in the beginning, they'd both stick around 1000.

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-05 15:51:02

Okay, what about a cap on "total Elo transfered between to players", where we're adding the absolute value into the figure after each game (instead of tracking the net).

Say the cap is 32. You win a few chips before they leave, gain 5 Elo from them, so the total between you is now 5. You play again, lose a few chips, lose 10 Elo to them, so the total is now 15. Play again, lose a few more chips, lose 15 Elo to them, so the total is now 30. Play again, sweep the table against them, gain 38 Elo from them, the total is now 68, and you can't see them anymore.

Two players that are evenly matched, going back-and-forth a lot, would slowly work up to this limit, at which point we are saying, "well, you're evenly matched, we've seen enough between you two, we need other vs. measurements now."

But someone feeding from a dummy account would be stopped after just one game vs. the dummy.

Finally, someone leaving a game early after only a few chips move wouldn't mess anything up, because you could still face them again later. We don't know enough about you relative to them, so you SHOULD face them again later.

32 is just an example limit. Maybe set it at 64, allowing two full table sweeps in either direction, or quite a bit more back-and-forth games, before we cut players off from each other. 64 would limit dummy feeding to 2 games per dummy account.

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-05 16:59:04

Rolling back a bit, I moved toward the Elo tournament idea with the hope that Elo itself would solve collusion problems, but it turns out that it isn't strong enough by itself to solve collusion, so we still need another solution on top of that (hard-limiting total won from another player somehow).

I still like the idea of profit-based tournaments (match main game skill, they don't have a late-joiner problem), but the problem was funding the prize pool. That problem is solved by the entry fee.

Elo is more complicated and more hard to understand than profit for players in the thick of the tournament. Why did my score just go up by X points?

SO...

1. Entry fee paid up front that goes to the prize pool (example: $5).

2. Fixed stake for all tournament games (example: 50 cents), normal tributes.

3. Free-for-all structure with a time limit.

4. Limit on how much profit you can win, net, from another player. You stop seeing that player as an option after you've won too much from them.

5. Winners determined by overall net profit at the tournament stake level when time limit reached.

AnoHito · 2015-01-05 19:17:16

Sounds good to me. Though I still wish you'd consider only allowing you to play another person once, because I really think adding pressure to not leave a game makes things more interesting.

jere · 2015-01-05 19:49:11

I concur, this sounds great. There's probably more worst case scenarios one could dream up, but at some point you just need to test it out.

computermouth · 2015-01-06 00:25:25

Sounds like a plan! Small request, since it's Elo based, can we get a tourney leaderboard set up so we can check where we're at mid-tournament?

jere · 2015-01-06 00:30:07

Based on Jason's latest post above, it sounds like he's dropping the Elo thing during the tournament in place of profit. I imagine there'll be a realtime leaderboard either way, since there was one last time.

computermouth · 2015-01-06 00:55:42

Oh, oops! Regardless, a tournament leaderboard. I was unfortunately too late to the game to make Boxing Day, so I wasn't sure.

Last edited by computermouth (2015-01-06 00:56:13)

zed · 2015-01-06 02:28:29

One possible problem with time-limited tournaments: it heavily penalises
considerate, conservative play. With enough players involved, the highest
scores are likely to be obtained by those who bet rashly but happen to get
lucky.

mzo · 2015-01-06 02:32:37

Last tournament (probably related to time limit), the highest scores went to those who played more players which may have either been more frequent all-ins or table hopping.

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-06 02:43:46

I'm not sure that pattern is present in these results, mzo:

http://cordialminuet.com/gameServer/ser … e=sea_goat

The people way down played few games, but I think they dropped out after they saw they had no chance.

But yes, this is essentially a "who can make the most per hour at this game" contest. That seems like a fair measure of true skill in the game.

With the newly described caps in place, you can only win so much from each player before you run out of players to win from.

If you just let it run its natural course, it will eventually grind itself to a halt once everyone has sorted themselves out into won-from order (you can't play against someone who you've either won too much from or who has won too much from you, because their cap blocks them from playing you).

So... if you set the time limit long enough, then fast play won't be an issue, because even the slow players will run out of opponents.

CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

#1 2015-01-01 20:23:11

New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#2 2015-01-01 21:38:06

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#3 2015-01-01 22:49:55

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#4 2015-01-02 02:42:12

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#5 2015-01-02 14:33:52

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#6 2015-01-03 02:25:47

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#7 2015-01-03 04:14:18

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#8 2015-01-03 12:54:04

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#9 2015-01-03 20:12:27

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#10 2015-01-03 22:10:49

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#11 2015-01-04 00:55:46

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#12 2015-01-04 01:29:26

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#13 2015-01-04 02:43:47

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#14 2015-01-04 22:26:52

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#15 2015-01-05 00:05:55

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#16 2015-01-05 15:51:02

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#17 2015-01-05 16:59:04

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#18 2015-01-05 19:17:16

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#19 2015-01-05 19:49:11

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#20 2015-01-06 00:25:25

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#21 2015-01-06 00:30:07

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#22 2015-01-06 00:55:42

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#23 2015-01-06 02:28:29

Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

#24 2015-01-06 02:32:37

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Re: New idea for a tournament structure---feedback, please

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