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Author Topic: Could one structure Dominion as a serious tournament game (for serious money)?  (Read 18276 times)

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ftl

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You also are all forgetting one thing- RULES. Tourny Rules. Like for instance, what happens if someone makes a hand jester or something that appears to be trying to give advice? What if a parent walks up to the board their kid is playing at and yells YOWZA! or NO!!!!!!!!!! when he makes a bad decision? What should kids be doing when they need help with a situation (rule clarification, etc.). What if I have to go to the restroom in the middle of my game? :(

That's not Dominion-specific. Do the same thing that people do for any other 2-player competitive game.
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Axe Knight

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You also are all forgetting one thing- RULES. Tourny Rules. Like for instance, what happens if someone makes a hand jester or something that appears to be trying to give advice? What if a parent walks up to the board their kid is playing at and yells YOWZA! or NO!!!!!!!!!! when he makes a bad decision? What should kids be doing when they need help with a situation (rule clarification, etc.). What if I have to go to the restroom in the middle of my game? :(

Most of this is decorum, and would be of course decided before events began.  Somehow, millions of tournaments of all sorts of things go on without having to worry about this stuff much. 
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blueblimp

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Aside from the fact that the "100-0 and could have gone either way" bit is a rather edge case, let me elaborate a bit.

It's not as though we're adding up the raw scores for each board and going from there.  Each setup (let's say we play 10 kingdoms for this) would make up 10% of each player's total score.  Let's say there are 22 total players, and thus 11 matchups.  You'd get 1 matchpoint for each person playing your direction that you beat, and 1/2 point for each that you tied, for a maximum on each kingdom of 10 matchpoints.  If you lose 1000-0, well, guess what, the worst that you can do is get 0/10 on that kingdom.

The bad part about this is when you get into KC/Goons setups where someone has the incentive to not end the game even though they're up 500-20.  I'm not sure of the best way to resolve that, but it's not any more luck based than whether you're sitting 1st or 4th when the Sea Hag with no trashers comes up.
This encourages collusion between opponents to rack up large scores. Doesn't even need to be blatant either: curser on the board? Why don't we ignore that, it'll be better for both of us. ;)

Edit: Also, 100-0 is not an edge case at all. KC-Bridge available with enablers? Neither player will buy any VP until they hit KC-KC-Bridge-Bridge-Bridge, and you will get a final score of 57-3 or thereabouts, even if the other player could have won next turn.
« Last Edit: August 22, 2012, 06:34:51 pm by blueblimp »
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ftl

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In an engine game where the game ends on piles, your score is fundamentally not related to how far ahead of your opponent you are. With +buy, you end the game on piles as soon as you are able to do so with a win, and buy, say, 1 point more than your opponent when you do so.

Don't count scores for anything. That way lie stupid rulings which are designed for smithy-money games and break down whenever the games get clever. The only meaningful bit of information that you get out of a game is who won; you don't get any more fine-grained information than that.
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Davio

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200 people in 2 days is impossible without luck.

It's also pretty simple to understand that a game of Dominion between two equally skilled players will be decided by luck 100% of the time, otherwise they wouldn't be of equal skill, get it?

This is true because luck plays an inherent factor in Dominion. There is shuffling, hence luck.
It's not true in chess where I'm pretty sure there is no luck. Well, you could be lucky to be white but you can just play 2 games to solve that.

If there is a 1% skill difference between 2 players, the part that luck plays is still close to 100%.

So you really can't throw luck out of the equation no matter how hard you try. This means you have to accept that it's a factor and by the end of two days you're not really crowning the luckiest overall, but you are crowning the luckiest of the best players.
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blueblimp

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It's also pretty simple to understand that a game of Dominion between two equally skilled players will be decided by luck 100% of the time, otherwise they wouldn't be of equal skill, get it?
This isn't accounting for playing well or badly. Otherwise, in games with no luck, two equally-skilled players would see the same game outcome every time, which obviously isn't true.
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popsofctown

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200 people in 2 days is impossible without luck.

It's also pretty simple to understand that a game of Dominion between two equally skilled players will be decided by luck 100% of the time, otherwise they wouldn't be of equal skill, get it?

This is true because luck plays an inherent factor in Dominion. There is shuffling, hence luck.
It's not true in chess where I'm pretty sure there is no luck. Well, you could be lucky to be white but you can just play 2 games to solve that.

If there is a 1% skill difference between 2 players, the part that luck plays is still close to 100%.

So you really can't throw luck out of the equation no matter how hard you try. This means you have to accept that it's a factor and by the end of two days you're not really crowning the luckiest overall, but you are crowning the luckiest of the best players.

Chess has luck.

You can argue this from two angles

1) How else do you explain best of 7 sets between players of different strengths being anything but 4 straight wins?

2) The future possibilities of a game are too many to be analyzed and calculated.  Thus, the chess player skips some analyses, and at some point, just guesses that the knight takes bishop retaken by bishop pawn push pawn push pawn push rook e4 rook f6 queen g6 is good for him.  Neither player actually looked at that chain of possibilities, but one player chooses to take the first step.  He bases that first step on other reasons, he probably analyzed some other equally long chains, and liked them, but neither player looked at this one.

The line of reasoning makes sense to me and I buy it.  At some point there are decisionmaking criteria that are, in actuality, arbitrary to successful victory in the game.  If they are arbitrary to victory they function randomly.



Think of it this way.  What if in a contest, I gave you a square grid of 100 division problems.  The divisors are all primes between 17 and 31 and you only have to produce the remainder, and your pencil writes quickly.  The numerators are all ten digit numbers.  Prize is five hundred dollars, you have to beat ftl.  I give you 40% as much time as it takes an intelligent person to solve all the division problems correctly.

Both you and ftl will solve 40% of the problems, probably the first 40%, because why not.  Then in a negligible amount of time you will guess the other 60% because each remainder you right gives you roughly a 4% chance of another right answer.  This game clearly has luck, you didn't really work all the problems.  The problems you two had time to work will be a brute contest of mathematical skill, and the best man will probably win, but one player may luck out.

Now if I instead rename half the problems "shuffle luck", and hide the numerators with black highlighter, leaving functionally random numerators, have I changed how much luck this game has?  No, not really, you're still going to guess on 60% of the problems.

Outcomes that can't be foreseen exactly are indistinguishable from outcomes that we don't have the time to analyze and then foretell is what I'm getting at.  It makes sense to me.  It's hard though.

This is why chess requires some sample size.  Not much but some.
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polonkus

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Aside from the fact that the "100-0 and could have gone either way" bit is a rather edge case, let me elaborate a bit.

It's not as though we're adding up the raw scores for each board and going from there.  Each setup (let's say we play 10 kingdoms for this) would make up 10% of each player's total score.  Let's say there are 22 total players, and thus 11 matchups.  You'd get 1 matchpoint for each person playing your direction that you beat, and 1/2 point for each that you tied, for a maximum on each kingdom of 10 matchpoints.  If you lose 1000-0, well, guess what, the worst that you can do is get 0/10 on that kingdom.

The bad part about this is when you get into KC/Goons setups where someone has the incentive to not end the game even though they're up 500-20.  I'm not sure of the best way to resolve that, but it's not any more luck based than whether you're sitting 1st or 4th when the Sea Hag with no trashers comes up.
This encourages collusion between opponents to rack up large scores. Doesn't even need to be blatant either: curser on the board? Why don't we ignore that, it'll be better for both of us. ;)

Edit: Also, 100-0 is not an edge case at all. KC-Bridge available with enablers? Neither player will buy any VP until they hit KC-KC-Bridge-Bridge-Bridge, and you will get a final score of 57-3 or thereabouts, even if the other player could have won next turn.

I believe that this type of collusion actually did happen at a past tournament which took into account relative scores.
Anyone remember the details?
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DWetzel

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Aside from the fact that the "100-0 and could have gone either way" bit is a rather edge case, let me elaborate a bit.

It's not as though we're adding up the raw scores for each board and going from there.  Each setup (let's say we play 10 kingdoms for this) would make up 10% of each player's total score.  Let's say there are 22 total players, and thus 11 matchups.  You'd get 1 matchpoint for each person playing your direction that you beat, and 1/2 point for each that you tied, for a maximum on each kingdom of 10 matchpoints.  If you lose 1000-0, well, guess what, the worst that you can do is get 0/10 on that kingdom.

The bad part about this is when you get into KC/Goons setups where someone has the incentive to not end the game even though they're up 500-20.  I'm not sure of the best way to resolve that, but it's not any more luck based than whether you're sitting 1st or 4th when the Sea Hag with no trashers comes up.
This encourages collusion between opponents to rack up large scores. Doesn't even need to be blatant either: curser on the board? Why don't we ignore that, it'll be better for both of us. ;)

Edit: Also, 100-0 is not an edge case at all. KC-Bridge available with enablers? Neither player will buy any VP until they hit KC-KC-Bridge-Bridge-Bridge, and you will get a final score of 57-3 or thereabouts, even if the other player could have won next turn.

1. Depends on how the scores are done, if it's point DIFFERENCE (which was my possibly poorly illustrated intent), no such collusion possibility exists.  What's good for P1 is bad for P2.

2. While your point is possible, in such a case, the person who realized that their opponent is about to go off and decides to buy a province and lose 54-9 instead will be rewarded, relative to people with equal luck. 

And there's just no way around the shuffle and seating luck, regardless of the format, so even discussing that is pretty pointless.  The only way to minimize that is to get more games in.
« Last Edit: August 22, 2012, 07:27:38 pm by DWetzel »
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Kirian

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So, I'm tempted to simply say "No."  But hey, this is all just speculation, right?

a) Luck should be minimized, and it should be a very good (but obviously not perfect) indicator of players' relative skills - at the very least, the very best players should reliably place near the top. [i.e. if you were to run the tournament again, you'd see a lot of the same people in the final rounds]

This automatically means a Swiss system with multiple games per matchup.

Quote
b) You have 2 weekend days, of 8 hours at most each day.
c) It should be able to accommodate a player pool of at least 200 people.

Again, the only way to do both of these and have any sort of reliable outcome is Swiss.  I still don't think you can get a truly reliable outcome from 200 players in 16 hours though.  20, maybe, but I think you really need 24.

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- How many players per game?
Two.  Is this really even a question any longer?

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- Should players play a single game, two games (each going first), or a longer match (3, 5, 7)?
Longer.  I'd advocate some variant of the tennis system I discussed in a different thread.  Players start first in order A-B-B-A-A-B, with tie games being replayed.  First to three wins and winning by two takes the match; a 3-3 finish is a tie.  Each match is therefore around 2 hours.

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- If multiple games, should the Kingdom be changed or remain the same?
Changed each time, but all tables should play the same set of six kingdoms each round.  Kingdoms would be randomized by the TO and distributed as games are played.

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- Should it be single-elim, double-elim, swiss with points, etc?
- How will players be matched up?
- How do you deal with ties?
Swiss.  Start with random matchups for round one. Use FIDE tiebreakers where needed.

Quote
- How should time be managed?
Time controls are difficult; only time spent making real decisions should be counted against a competitor.  Ideally, the matches would be over in two hours; at ninety minutes, judges would be asked to determine if players are deliberately playing slowly.

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- How will Kingdom cards be selected?
- Should players know the Kingdom cards beforehand for any particular round?
- Should players have the same starting hand?
- Should there be any banned cards, or perhaps a veto system?
Randomly, no, yes, no.  A year ago I would have answered yes to the last question, but I've changed my stance there.  The singular exception might be Possession due to its likely effect on game length, not game play.
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ftl

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2. While your point is possible, in such a case, the person who realized that their opponent is about to go off and decides to buy a province and lose 54-9 instead will be rewarded, relative to people with equal luck. 

That rewards suboptimal playing-for-second-place decks. A Big Money deck will always get a province or two before the engine takes off and buys the rest. Doesn't mean the BM deck was closer to winning than the engine deck which had zero points because it was building up to the mega-turn that the opponent got to first.

In a lot of games, the relevant measure is "winning by X turns" - not "winning by X points". If I'm one turn away from having my deck fire and buy everything when my opponent's deck fires and buys everything, that's a really close, really well-played game - we differed by only one turn, but that one-turn difference could be an arbitrarily number of points, anywhere from one point difference to MEGA-GOONS-TURN, where that point difference means little to nothing. Whereas in a deck where a BM+X strategy competes against a mega-turn engine, the BM+X will get a few provinces, making the score look close even if the engine was the optimal strategy by far.

Here's another example - Ambassador games! Whoever wins the ambassador war probably gives their opponent all 10 curses by the end of the game. Doesn't matter whether it was close or not close, whoever wins will give out all 10.

Oh, here's a BM+X example - duchy-dancing! I could buy the last province and lose by a point. OR, I could buy a duchy, with one province remaining, since that gives me a chance to win if on the next turn, my opponent buys an estate and I have a chance to grab the last province. The latter SHOULD be clearly the right play, since it gives you a chance to pull out a win. And yet, buying the province is likely to lead to "lose by 1", while playing to win is likely to have you lose by 10 (if the opponent buys the last province on the next turn). Rewards people who end the game with a loss as long as it's a loss by not very many points, rather than rewarding people that play for the chance to win.


...just don't do it. Points in Dominion are NOT  a valid indicator of quality of play; while they may seem to be such at first glance, it's not actually true.
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blueblimp

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As far as reducing the luck in a match of Dominion goes, there's always the doubling cube option. :P
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carstimon

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Implementation:  Use rejection sampling on kingdom sets.  Both players see the randomly drawn kingdoms, get 5 (2, 3?) minutes to analyze it, and then privately write down a kingdom card that the opponent can't buy/gain.  If they write down the same card, start over.
I hope you don't mind me going back a page to disagree with this.
I agree that mirror matches are boring, but I think this implementation has problems.  For instance, chapel.  Chapel is just sooo game changing, even if a board has multiple options.  This will practically mean that chapel isn't used.  Yeah, I mean there's board when it's an interesting decision whether or not to chapel, but I think this will just kill many interesting games.
Same goes for other power cards: KC, hunting party, torturer where chainable.
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DWetzel

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2. While your point is possible, in such a case, the person who realized that their opponent is about to go off and decides to buy a province and lose 54-9 instead will be rewarded, relative to people with equal luck. 

That rewards suboptimal playing-for-second-place decks. A Big Money deck will always get a province or two before the engine takes off and buys the rest. Doesn't mean the BM deck was closer to winning than the engine deck which had zero points because it was building up to the mega-turn that the opponent got to first.

In a lot of games, the relevant measure is "winning by X turns" - not "winning by X points". If I'm one turn away from having my deck fire and buy everything when my opponent's deck fires and buys everything, that's a really close, really well-played game - we differed by only one turn, but that one-turn difference could be an arbitrarily number of points, anywhere from one point difference to MEGA-GOONS-TURN, where that point difference means little to nothing. Whereas in a deck where a BM+X strategy competes against a mega-turn engine, the BM+X will get a few provinces, making the score look close even if the engine was the optimal strategy by far.

Here's another example - Ambassador games! Whoever wins the ambassador war probably gives their opponent all 10 curses by the end of the game. Doesn't matter whether it was close or not close, whoever wins will give out all 10.

Oh, here's a BM+X example - duchy-dancing! I could buy the last province and lose by a point. OR, I could buy a duchy, with one province remaining, since that gives me a chance to win if on the next turn, my opponent buys an estate and I have a chance to grab the last province. The latter SHOULD be clearly the right play, since it gives you a chance to pull out a win. And yet, buying the province is likely to lead to "lose by 1", while playing to win is likely to have you lose by 10 (if the opponent buys the last province on the next turn). Rewards people who end the game with a loss as long as it's a loss by not very many points, rather than rewarding people that play for the chance to win.


...just don't do it. Points in Dominion are NOT  a valid indicator of quality of play; while they may seem to be such at first glance, it's not actually true.


Neither, really, are win/loss in a lot of cases either (see the "who happens to draw the KC/Bridge combo first in an otherwise mirrored match"), but we use that.  At least with this method you're more fundamentally comparing apples to apples.  I don't deny that it creates a somewhat different "winning" heuristic, I just deny that that's an inherently bad thing.
« Last Edit: August 22, 2012, 09:03:26 pm by DWetzel »
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blueblimp

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Make it two player.

Contentious suggestion:  Goal: Try to eliminate mirror games where players execute the same obvious strategy.  These games are either decided either by the luck of the draw or tactics, but I think the tactical decisions aren't usually that hard or interesting, and so are not good player skill differentators.  Implementation:  Use rejection sampling on kingdom sets.  Both players see the randomly drawn kingdoms, get 5 (2, 3?) minutes to analyze it, and then privately write down a kingdom card that the opponent can't buy/gain.  If they write down the same card, start over.
One other thing about this... assuming the two players don't write down the same card, is the rule against buying/gaining it actually enforced during the game? Because that wouldn't be much like Dominion anymore. But if you didn't enforce the ban, then the choice would be a bit meaningless.
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Jive Junkie

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Thanks for the great ideas, everyone!

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Wait, is this really a hypothetical?  Just in case it is not, and you happen to be a billionaire (or your friend is), and you're posting this as part of your planning of such a tourney... then please consider this my sign-up.

Even though I'm way early, I'm proud to be the first to register for your tournament, sir.  Anything I can do to help organize it?

No comment.  :P

Make it two player.

This is something I'd be conflicted about. Multiplayer definitely occupies some of the space of "Dominion", but it definitely has increased variance and will take longer to complete games. I think I would be for acknowledging its existence and the fact that there is skill in adapting your play for more players. Perhaps have multiplayer take up 25% of the swiss rounds (2 matches out of 8, for example)?


Contentious suggestion:  Goal: Try to eliminate mirror games where players execute the same obvious strategy.  These games are either decided either by the luck of the draw or tactics, but I think the tactical decisions aren't usually that hard or interesting, and so are not good player skill differentators.  Implementation:  Use rejection sampling on kingdom sets.  Both players see the randomly drawn kingdoms, get 5 (2, 3?) minutes to analyze it, and then privately write down a kingdom card that the opponent can't buy/gain.  If they write down the same card, start over.

That sounds like a really fun variant, but I wonder if it may stray too far from "pure" Dominion for most people.

As a random aside, how often does the mirror match come into play with the highest-ranked players (say 40+)? Among those, how often is it a fairly exact mirror match, and how often do they vary by 1-2 support cards?

Quote from: Kirian
Randomly, no, yes, no.  A year ago I would have answered yes to the last question, but I've changed my stance there.  The singular exception might be Possession due to its likely effect on game length, not game play.

Hmm, along those lines, would it make sense to try to limit the number of Colony games as well? How about other time-heavy cards? (I don't know what they would be off the top of my head)


Quote from: BlueBlimp
Edit: Also, 100-0 is not an edge case at all. KC-Bridge available with enablers? Neither player will buy any VP until they hit KC-KC-Bridge-Bridge-Bridge, and you will get a final score of 57-3 or thereabouts, even if the other player could have won next turn.

So points as a tie-breaker seems like it could give inaccurate results. How about opponent record as a tie-breaker? I know some tournaments do that when making the swiss cutoff for the next round / playoffs.


Quote from: Davio
200 people in 2 days is impossible without luck.

It's also pretty simple to understand that a game of Dominion between two equally skilled players will be decided by luck 100% of the time, otherwise they wouldn't be of equal skill, get it?

This is true because luck plays an inherent factor in Dominion. There is shuffling, hence luck.
It's not true in chess where I'm pretty sure there is no luck. Well, you could be lucky to be white but you can just play 2 games to solve that.

If there is a 1% skill difference between 2 players, the part that luck plays is still close to 100%.

So you really can't throw luck out of the equation no matter how hard you try. This means you have to accept that it's a factor and by the end of two days you're not really crowning the luckiest overall, but you are crowning the luckiest of the best players.

I think that would be an acceptable outcome. Poker, for instance, never really crowns the best player, but a combination of the best play + best luck. You still see a lot of the same faces at the final table, so striving for that should be good enough for Dominion.

And someone else made the point that sometimes the better player overall may not be the better player on any given match. Maybe that combination of cards fails to inspire him as much as it does the lesser player. Maybe he overlooks some weird corner case card interaction that proves to be the difference. Maybe he's distracted because his girlfriend broke up with him due to jealousy over his true love (Dominion).

Do you guys think a 20 hour tourney length would help? I could see 2 10-hour days being feasible.
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Kirian

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So points as a tie-breaker seems like it could give inaccurate results. How about opponent record as a tie-breaker? I know some tournaments do that when making the swiss cutoff for the next round / playoffs.

In a Swiss system, you can go through a bunch of different tiebreakers if you need to.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tie-breaking_in_Swiss-system_tournaments

FIDE uses a specific set of tie-breaker rules which includes rules for dropouts and byes; I used them in the IsoDom tournament.  There's no need to ever, ever use game points as a tiebreaker in Dominion.  It's a bad, bad, bad, bad idea.

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Do you guys think a 20 hour tourney length would help? I could see 2 10-hour days being feasible.

20 hours might do it.  It's enough for eight solid rounds, which segregates up to 256 via either elimination or Swiss.
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You also are all forgetting one thing- RULES. Tourny Rules. Like for instance, what happens if someone makes a hand jester or something that appears to be trying to give advice? What if a parent walks up to the board their kid is playing at and yells YOWZA! or NO!!!!!!!!!! when he makes a bad decision? What should kids be doing when they need help with a situation (rule clarification, etc.). What if I have to go to the restroom in the middle of my game? :(

Most of this is decorum, and would be of course decided before events began.  Somehow, millions of tournaments of all sorts of things go on without having to worry about this stuff much. 
Well yeah, lots of stuff is decided before events begin but as Dominion gets bigger more people play it. And, there are vods on youtube that also show very young kids playing Dominion.

@pops yes I am a 'youth' as you call it.
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Mole5000

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2. While your point is possible, in such a case, the person who realized that their opponent is about to go off and decides to buy a province and lose 54-9 instead will be rewarded, relative to people with equal luck. 

That rewards suboptimal playing-for-second-place decks. A Big Money deck will always get a province or two before the engine takes off and buys the rest. Doesn't mean the BM deck was closer to winning than the engine deck which had zero points because it was building up to the mega-turn that the opponent got to first.

In a lot of games, the relevant measure is "winning by X turns" - not "winning by X points". If I'm one turn away from having my deck fire and buy everything when my opponent's deck fires and buys everything, that's a really close, really well-played game - we differed by only one turn, but that one-turn difference could be an arbitrarily number of points, anywhere from one point difference to MEGA-GOONS-TURN, where that point difference means little to nothing. Whereas in a deck where a BM+X strategy competes against a mega-turn engine, the BM+X will get a few provinces, making the score look close even if the engine was the optimal strategy by far.

Here's another example - Ambassador games! Whoever wins the ambassador war probably gives their opponent all 10 curses by the end of the game. Doesn't matter whether it was close or not close, whoever wins will give out all 10.

Oh, here's a BM+X example - duchy-dancing! I could buy the last province and lose by a point. OR, I could buy a duchy, with one province remaining, since that gives me a chance to win if on the next turn, my opponent buys an estate and I have a chance to grab the last province. The latter SHOULD be clearly the right play, since it gives you a chance to pull out a win. And yet, buying the province is likely to lead to "lose by 1", while playing to win is likely to have you lose by 10 (if the opponent buys the last province on the next turn). Rewards people who end the game with a loss as long as it's a loss by not very many points, rather than rewarding people that play for the chance to win.


...just don't do it. Points in Dominion are NOT  a valid indicator of quality of play; while they may seem to be such at first glance, it's not actually true.


Neither, really, are win/loss in a lot of cases either (see the "who happens to draw the KC/Bridge combo first in an otherwise mirrored match"), but we use that.  At least with this method you're more fundamentally comparing apples to apples.  I don't deny that it creates a somewhat different "winning" heuristic, I just deny that that's an inherently bad thing.

So the correct solution is to reject the idea that you can determine the 'quality' of a win and just accept that you only have win/lose/draw to work off rather than coming up with tournament rules that would totally distort play and in no way reflect the reality of the situation.
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Wolphmaniac

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Now I'm curious; does anyone know the highest stakes ever for a Magic tournament?  I have no idea what goes on in that scene but I'm curious to know now.

I also figure that the upper limit for prize money in a Dominion tournament is probably equal to 1/10th of whatever the biggest Magic tournament was.
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Sidenote - you do realize that in order for 200 people to compete in such a tournament, you'll need at least 100 new copies of the Base and each expansion, right?
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Sidenote - you do realize that in order for 200 people to compete in such a tournament, you'll need at least 100 new copies of the Base and each expansion, right?

You could just not have independent boards, but distribute the 170 cards (at which number are we at the moment) over all tables. That would give you random boards on each table, which just happen to not be independent over tables. But I don't see why this should matter. So you would only need about 1/2 (large) expansion per table, so ~50 boxes in total. +some Base cards. +maybe Ruins/Shelters, there probably aren't enough.  Don't want to calculate how many you will need.

Small problems with BlackMarket here, maybe just don't use it, or take an extra set per BM (so you have 10 extra of each card, which you can distirbute among the BMs.
« Last Edit: August 23, 2012, 08:57:34 am by DStu »
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Sidenote - you do realize that in order for 200 people to compete in such a tournament, you'll need at least 100 new copies of the Base and each expansion, right?

You could just not have independent boards, but distribute the 170 cards (at which number are we at the moment) over all tables. That would give you random boards on each table, which just happen to not be independent over tables. But I don't see why this should matter. So you would only need about 1/2 (large) expansion per table, so ~50 boxes in total. +some Base cards. +maybe Ruins/Shelters, there probably aren't enough.  Don't want to calculate how many you will need.

Small problems with BlackMarket here, maybe just don't use it, or take an extra set per BM (so you have 10 extra of each card, which you can distirbute among the BMs.

But then you're not being purely random.  Also, there are currently 187 kingdom cards (192 if you count Promos).
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Sidenote - you do realize that in order for 200 people to compete in such a tournament, you'll need at least 100 new copies of the Base and each expansion, right?

You could just not have independent boards, but distribute the 170 cards (at which number are we at the moment) over all tables. That would give you random boards on each table, which just happen to not be independent over tables. But I don't see why this should matter. So you would only need about 1/2 (large) expansion per table, so ~50 boxes in total. +some Base cards. +maybe Ruins/Shelters, there probably aren't enough.  Don't want to calculate how many you will need.

Small problems with BlackMarket here, maybe just don't use it, or take an extra set per BM (so you have 10 extra of each card, which you can distirbute among the BMs.

But then you're not being purely random.  Also, there are currently 187 kingdom cards (192 if you count Promos).
This discussion is relevant for a realistic scenario but it is moot given the parameters of the scenario proposed by the OP.  The tournament is being financed by a billionaire and has a $10 million purse.  The billionaire can easily afford to procure all of the necessary sets.  Not to mention procuring the physical space to host the tournament.
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DStu

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Sidenote - you do realize that in order for 200 people to compete in such a tournament, you'll need at least 100 new copies of the Base and each expansion, right?

You could just not have independent boards, but distribute the 170 cards (at which number are we at the moment) over all tables. That would give you random boards on each table, which just happen to not be independent over tables. But I don't see why this should matter. So you would only need about 1/2 (large) expansion per table, so ~50 boxes in total. +some Base cards. +maybe Ruins/Shelters, there probably aren't enough.  Don't want to calculate how many you will need.

Small problems with BlackMarket here, maybe just don't use it, or take an extra set per BM (so you have 10 extra of each card, which you can distirbute among the BMs.

But then you're not being purely random.  Also, there are currently 187 kingdom cards (192 if you count Promos).

Every single table gets a completely random set of cards. Each set has with probability 1/(n chose 10).  Sets between the tables are not independent, but that does not matter, because there is no interaction across tables.

Edit: Look at this like this. You have say 2 tables and only base game. You have 25 cards, perfectly shuffled. So now you give the first 10 cards to the first table, the second 10 cards to the second table. Without knowing the 10 first cards, the second 10 are a perfectly fine random set. The first 10 card are also without knowing the second 10 cards. So if the second table wouldn't exist, the first one would not even doubt that their cards are uniform random. And if the first table does not exists, the second one would not doubt.
So of course they now exists, and because of this the cards on both tables combined are not as they would be if you give both tables their cards indepently of each other. But there are no interactions across tables, so you don't mind if the 20cards have the proper distribution. All you need to know is if the first 10cards have, and the second 10 cards have, without caring for the correlations between these sets. And as we have shown above, each 10 for their own are perfectly fine.

Unless there is some interaction over tables that I don't see.
« Last Edit: August 23, 2012, 10:06:14 am by DStu »
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