[pbmserv] 2nd Annual Quoridor Tournament

["markthom" <markthom@flash.net>]

barticus wrote:

> We had a Quoridor tournament starting in January this year.  When it ended
> I asked when there would ba another and was told it might be an annual
> event.  I don't recall who ran it last time (but the name Mark Thompson
> comes to mind).
>
> Will there be another tournament?  If so when?

Good heavens, it's almost 2004! Thanks for the reminder, barticus, it's high time for people to start thinking about that.

So: like last year, I will host a Quoridor tournament, starting late January or early February this time, for up to 20 players. If
12 or more sign up, I will also award a new, shrink-wrapped Quoridor set to the winner.

As a format, I think the feeling in the first tournament was that the round robins should have at least 5 players, since 4-player
rounds led to too many 3-way ties. So I'm thinking that I'll divide the players into rounds of no fewer than 5 players and no more
than, say, 8. (What if the number of players doesn't divide evenly? If there were, for instance, 17 players, would it be okay to
have two rounds of 6 and one of 5? Hopefully we'll get a nice, composite number of players.)

I think we also decided that it was better to have two games per pairing, so that each person plays each other person twice, once as
first-mover and once as second-mover.

Time limits are always hard to manage, because on the one hand I don't want anyone to feel rushed into playing without taking enough
time to find the move they think is best, but on the other we don't want to delay the tournament too much. The first tournament
finished in well under a year, which seems okay with me. How about, each player's clock starts with 30 days, and each move sets it
back one day? So you would have, for example, 55 days to make 25 moves. Therefore a 30-move game should be finished in no more than
4 months maximum. I think all the games of the first tournament would have obeyed this time limit.

The players who win the most games in each preliminary round will advance to a final round, which I hope will also have 5-8 players.

> I would like to suggest a change in the rules of Quoridor.  I think it
> would be better with 9 walls per player instead of 10.  The publisher was
> including four player rules with 5 walls per player, so the set has 20
> walls, but that is happenstance.  I have been trying to get my opponents to
> run out of walls, and it hardly ever happens.  You could call this whining;
> I found a strategy that keeps failing and I am trying to change the rules
> to fit my strategy, but I think that running out of walls should be an
> important part of the game.  I think 12 is the limit for competent play;
> there is no difference between having 12 walls and 20.  There's a trifling
> difference between 12 and 11, a slightly larger difference between 11 and
> 10, but a significant difference between 10 and 9.  From what I have seen,
> 9 is the tipping point.

I'm always interested in minor tweaks to game rules, since I doubt that most inventors really give extensive testing to all possible
combinations of the parameters before publishing. If the players want the tournament to be run with 9 walls instead of 10 I'd be
open to that.

If you'd like to play in this tournament, please send me:

- Your userid,
- Your name (if desired),
- Your feelings, if any, toward the possibility of unequal numbers of players in the rounds of round 1, and
- Your preference as to standard 10-wall Quoridor or the variant 9-wall Quoridor (assuming we can get it implemented).

Mark Thompson
userid markthomps