Rookie here

Maybe also this one: Is there a video series for terrible beginners?

Just wondering why anybody would want to do that. If you want to win all the time, just play an AI that is rated as low.

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AI canā€™t feel pain

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Ah, youā€™re saying that there are people who think that those who lose are injured by losing? Thatā€™s weird. Is go a game of balance or of war?

This is the first step of what we call sandbagging. You may be surprised but this is a reality on all go servers. Some players try to be underrated to keep control of the victory against a normally rated opponent.
Mods have a hard job fighting sandbagging and Itā€™s one of their main occupation.

Three days in, itā€™s demonstrating why I wanted a larger tournament:

So, new idea. Start with a Single Elimination or McMahon tournament, and invite all the new players. Everyone who plays at least 1 move there gets invited to a private Round Robin.

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How do you figure out who the new members are? I have yet to find a member list, the closest Iā€™ve found is the ladders, and those arenā€™t compulsoryā€¦

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Every player has a sequential ID that you can see in the URL of their player page. By experimentally trying URLs with higher and higher numbers until I start getting errors, I can discover the newest player, and then work backwards from there.

But actually, thatā€™s kind of slow, so in this case I started at the ID of the OP @Old_dirty_feet and went up. I used API URLs and a little script to determine the usernames to invite.

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I see! Thatā€™s some dedication there XD
If I havenā€™t lost my provisional rank by then, I would be interested in an invite, if I could~

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I set up a tournament the other day, round robin, the default number of players was 4-100. In the end I only wanted max 7 players so I didnā€™t test leaving it at 100. But if this is the default, surely itā€™s valid. Why do you think round robin is limited to 10?

FTR, a round robin with 100 players (99 games simultaneously!) would be brutal! :exploding_head:

The technical reason is probably ā€œthat is how the system is designed.ā€ The underlying reason, I suspect, is because tournaments tend to take a very long time. and the more players, the longer it takes. See The neverending story uhuhu uhuhu uhuhu for some nightmare stories.

There is no master list accessible to non-moderators. Besides, there are over a million accounts, and a significant proportion of them are alt accounts or dead accounts (banned or abandoned).

So it is true that round robins are max 10 players? Weird that the default is 100 then :laughing:

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This might twist your melonā€¦

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Thatā€™s weird, when I set up this tournament I couldnā€™t get more than 10ā€¦

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You didnā€™t try hard enough! :wink:

S_Alexander did many amazing things that arenā€™t available through standard options.

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I humbly bow to his vastly superior OGS hacking :heart:

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I think I know what @S_Alexander did, but I donā€™t want to bend the rules yet, so Iā€™ll proceed with my smaller tournaments for now.

I sent out about 500 invitations for this Swiss tournament and ended up catching 15 new players:

Itā€™s been more than 12 hours, and so far most of them have not done anything. Iā€™m expecting a lot of timeouts here too, but Iā€™m inviting all the active ones to a Round Robin.

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Both

I agree, both. I think I will try to answer my own question: many board games, and certainly chess and go, were first devised as an adjunct to instruction in waging war for princes, kings, queens, advisors, and generals, or at least in imitating those who waged war.

The strategies of go, which include creating influence, building walls, sente and gote moves, surrounding territory, and taking prisoners, are all good metaphors for aspects of waging war.

Yet, unlike most other games, go embodies a fragile balance between two opponents, much like the balance represented by a low height in the game of Tetris. Exceed a certain height and the risk of failure begins to increase exponentially.

In go, it is even possible to maintain mirror play for a few moves, yet mirror play will eventually fail as a strategy, when contact with the opponent is forced.

So I can see why people would get so attached to a need to win or the frustration of failing in go, even though the best strategy is to aim for balance at first.