Auto handicaps and provisional players

During the C19 lockdown we wanted to invite people who attend our tournament in NW Scotland to play a correspondence tourament on OGS. We wanted it handicapped as they vary a lot in strength. As it involved a few who were new to OGS these were with only provisional rankings. We called it Skye Stir Fry. But the handicapping went haywire - was that because there were provisional players involved? If so, we’d like to know soon as we have created another, Skye Stirred not Shaken, which we’d hoped would start on Friday and we don’t want it to have the same problem.

4 Likes

Provisional players shouldn’t be a problem.

1 Like

Could you describe the problem in more detial? Obviously it is hard to handicap provisional players as the system does not know their rank but for the rest it should work.

The usual misundarstendings are:

1 handicap means no komi, that is the handicap, there will NOT be an extra stone on the board.

And for 9x9 there is less handicaps than you would get on 19x19 board, because obviously on a smaller board the extra stone is worth more. So the forumula will NOT be Rank1-Rank2= nr. of HC stones

1 Like

Have a look at Skye Stir Fry. I’m playing Julko, he is 19 kyu and I’m 8 kyu asnd there’s no handicap. (It’s many years since we were provisional!) I haven’t looked at the details in other games in SSF but several people I know expressed surprise when there was no handicap even though they and their opponents were many kyu apart.

John (“beidao”) has been as careful as he can in stting up Skye Stirred not Shaken. He’s done it slightly differently from the way he did Skye Stir Fry. We’d just liker to be sure that this time the correct handicaps will be there.

1 Like

@anoek tournament with handicap set to auto, but games are without handicap.

1 Like

Oh, so the game you reported has nothing to do with it at all? :smiley: Well, played, you tricked me. But yeah it seems completely messed up, sorry about that.

@anoek
here are some of the relevant games:



Some games were handicapped and some not. On the off chance it is relevant, it seems the games NOT getting a handicap were those with players above the MacMahon bars? Not sure it can be the cause but who knows :smiley:

1 Like

Sorry about reporting it via that game that had nothing toi do with it. I was flapping a bit and had simply forgotten about the existence of the forums.

The question preoccupying John and me is, will the next one have the same problems? It’s Skye Shaken not Stirred.

1 Like

Is it only Scottish people who can play? Or anyone in the BGA?

1 Like

Everyone and anyone welcome - we set up open tournaments:-)

But we’re not absolutely certain that Skye Stirred not Shaken will have the format John intended. We’ve tried to test it with a dummy tournament, Czech Otto. That worked as intended so fingers crossed,

The developers are being told about the problem with Skye Stir Fry but that won’t be soon enough for SSnotS.

2 Likes

Same problem in this handicap tournament: Handicap Arena 2024 - 007
goshane0809 is a provisional player, and he plays even games with everyone, including a 5d and a 23k.

1 Like

Outch. Guess I will exclude provisional players from now on form those tournaments.