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Topic: 2006 Postal Tournament (Read 6973 times) |
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Fritzlein
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Arimaa player #706
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Posts: 5928
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2006 Postal Tournament
« on: Feb 26th, 2006, 12:05pm » |
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And they're off! Nineteen players, and that's without a bot. It's great to see both a growing community of players and advancing frontiers of Arimaa theory. If I can make some pretournament predictions:
* More people will set up with decentralized elephants than last year.
* More games will finish in some kind of goal race than last year.
* Positions in which a camel holds a horse hostage will replace positions in which a horse is framed as the critical strategic evaluation.
* The dual-lone-elephant opening, dominant 18 months ago, will occur in fewer than 5% of the games. That is to say, in 95% of the games one player or the other will voluntarily cross the midline with a piece other than the elephant by move 15.
* Games in which all four traps are simultaneously contested at some point (i.e. in which no player has complete control of any trap) used to be unheard of. This year at least 10% of the games will have such a position.
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jdb
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #214
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #1 on: Feb 26th, 2006, 12:12pm » |
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Some advice:
When analyzing games in the planning window, *close* the game window, to prevent sending a move by accident! When you have decided on your move, reopen the game window.
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Fritzlein
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #706
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Posts: 5928
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #2 on: Feb 26th, 2006, 12:25pm » |
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Only 5 of the 95 games are mismatches of more than 400 rating points. The largest rating difference is 480 points between me and JDB, but I'm not expecting that to be the most lopsided of the games; There should be a bunch of closely fought games, just like last year.
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frostlad
Forum Senior Member
Arimaa player #1704
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #3 on: Feb 26th, 2006, 2:16pm » |
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jdb I don't know if this is what you are talking about, but I was moving my pieces around in Ryan's game for the opening and right when I hit send my browser refreshed itself to the original configuration so I sent it like that instead accidentally.
So, instead I guess I'll try that opening in Megamau's game. I don't know if it is one of the qwerks from viewing the game window from a linux machine or why it was doing that.
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99of9
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Gnobby's creator (player #314)
 
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #4 on: Feb 26th, 2006, 7:08pm » |
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No frostlad, the bug you just saw is a different issue, but quite a quirky one (it often happens when people send chat comments I think).
Jeff is talking about using the "Plan" button at the side of the game client. This brings up a new game window which allows you to play ahead in the game, and consider opponent responses etc, without actually sending the moves to the real game.
Last year we had some cases where people thought they were fiddling around in the plan window, but were actually operating in the main game window, and sent a substandard move.
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Ryan_Cable
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Arimaa player #951
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #5 on: Feb 26th, 2006, 8:26pm » |
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frostlad, I sent an email to omar asking him to please reset the game.
I have never had this happen to me, but it happened to an opponent of mine in the WC. He noticed it before he hit send, but he made a mistake quickly resetting his pieces. He wanted to just continue the game anyway, but by a strange coincidence the server had a hard drive crash about 10 moves in to the game. When the server was fixed a few days later we completely restarted the game.
I don’t know what causes the pieces to reset, but I have only heard of it happening when someone thinks for several minutes about the setup or sends a chat message while setting up. I suggest you try to make up your mind what you want your setup to be (using the plan window if necessary) and then move all of the pieces to those positions at once.
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RonWeasley
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Harry's friend (Arimaa player #441)
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #6 on: Feb 27th, 2006, 1:01pm » |
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frostlad, that sounds like a Slytherin jinx. Harry said he'd protect these games, but he's off snogging Ginny.
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purplebaron
Forum Newbie
Arimaa player #1798
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #7 on: Feb 27th, 2006, 4:05pm » |
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Hey all,
I just signed up to the site and the Postal tournament. (Thank IdahoEv). I just wanted to give a warning to my opponents that I'll be delaying first moves for a few days while I brush up on some strategy.
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Fritzlein
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #706
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Posts: 5928
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #8 on: Feb 27th, 2006, 4:45pm » |
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on Feb 27th, 2006, 4:05pm, purplebaron wrote:| I just wanted to give a warning to my opponents that I'll be delaying first moves for a few days while I brush up on some strategy. |
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That's a great idea. Take some time, play a few bots, do the puzzles on the local Wiki (linked from the lobby), read the Wikipedia article, ask questions, etc. Your reserve time will show up as 20 days, but that's just the limit on each individual move. Actually you have 60 more days of reserve you can mete out to yourself as you get up to speed.
Last year many people found 10 games at a pace of one move per day to be incompatible with real life (except Weasley, who has a time turner). The new time control was intended to allow folks to ignore all their games for a week or two if real life gets busy, but feel free to use the cushion however you like.
The danger in using your whole reserve while other people are moving quickly is that some games will finish before yours really get heated, after which you will still be playing ten at once while your opponents are playing only a few. Still, that beats moving too quickly and getting into a bunch of lost situations before you know what is going on. Last year I was one of the slowest players, and I think I did well in part because I thought about my moves longer than most people. I think I still had eight games ongoing by the time Weasley had finished eight of his, but I didn't mind so much since I had good positions in all of them. 
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frostlad
Forum Senior Member
Arimaa player #1704
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #9 on: Feb 27th, 2006, 10:10pm » |
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By the way thanks Omar for resetting the game. I appreciate it.
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RonWeasley
Forum Guru
Harry's friend (Arimaa player #441)
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #10 on: Feb 28th, 2006, 11:15am » |
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New players should be aware of the little red number next to the game icon indicating whose move it is. Occasionally this number does not advance! That means if you think it's taking a while for your opponent to move, look in on the game amyway to be sure.
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Adanac
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Arimaa player #892
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #11 on: Mar 2nd, 2006, 7:40am » |
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on Feb 28th, 2006, 11:15am, RonWeasley wrote:| New players should be aware of the little red number next to the game icon indicating whose move it is. Occasionally this number does not advance! That means if you think it's taking a while for your opponent to move, look in on the game amyway to be sure. |
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Experienced players should be aware of this too. The clock had been ticking for 3 days for three of my games 
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omar
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Arimaa player #2
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #12 on: Mar 4th, 2006, 12:29pm » |
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on Mar 2nd, 2006, 7:40am, Adanac wrote:
Experienced players should be aware of this too. The clock had been ticking for 3 days for three of my games |
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If anyone runs into this, could you let me know before making your move so I can look into.
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Fritzlein
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #706
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Posts: 5928
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #13 on: Mar 4th, 2006, 2:47pm » |
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One week in, we've had a chance to see who the real eager beavers are. Summing the move numbers across all games for each person gives:
59 robinson
54 blue22
53 Belbo
46 dtj
44 Ryan_Cable
43 OLTI
42 Adanac
40 fritzlforpresident
40 RonWeasley
39 thorin
29 Fritzlein
29 frostlad
28 jdb
24 omar
22 99of9
22 megamau
12 IdahoEv
8 naveed
4 purplebaron
Rock on, Robinson!
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RonWeasley
Forum Guru
Harry's friend (Arimaa player #441)
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Posts: 882
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Re: 2006 Postal Tournament
« Reply #14 on: Mar 4th, 2006, 7:48pm » |
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I considered sending the following message, regardless of the position, to all my opponents at move 10: I see what you are trying to do and it won't work.
But I'm not really a natural with trash talk. Instead of risking someone taking it badly, I decided to share here.
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