Tournament Rules

Overview

A ""tournament"" will likely take 1 to 2 months to complete. Please do not join if you will not be available to keep your games moving during the tournament. It is fine if you can't play on weekends or will be away for a few days now and then...but more than that will get you disqualified. If your games are moving slowly and the rest of a round is finishing, the games may be scored for either player or removed from the round's standings. Any time you are going to be away, please set the Away field on your Bot Info page.

Rules

For 2P tournaments there are two rounds of pool play followed by elimination brackets. During pool play you will play 3-6 games at once against different opponents. The top finishers from pool play will compete in the championship bracket. The rest will compete in the consolation bracket.

Bracket matches are best-of-3.

Games will be started automatically. Games started by players will not count toward the tournament.

Any bot programming errors, 9-move-hands, or other disasters are just considered bad luck and cannot be fixed or restarted. Sorry.

Bugs might be fixable if reported in the forum by a player, and no further moves are submitted by that player.
If a bug can be repaired, the broken turn will be undone and new chips dealt. This is part of the game, and each player can decide whether or not to report a bug and request a fix.

Seeding for 2P tournaments will be done based on ratings from the previous 2P tournaments, ladder games, and duels.

Ties

Ties at the end of pool play will be broken as follows. If, after the application of a given rule, all of the bots are still tied, go to the next rule. Otherwise if one or more subgroups are still tied, separate these groups and go back to rule 1.

2P Tournaments

  1. Survived longer in the arena game in this pool, if there was one. (Down to priority of death, if needed)
  2. Better finish in the previous pool round.
  3. Head-to-head results between tied players.
  4. More "Points" scored in games lost. Points are figured as: (# of CP's you inspected) + (# of lives lost by opponent)
  5. Fewer "Points" allowed in games you won.
  6. Lower seed. (#2 seed beats #1 seed.)

8P and 4P Tournaments

  1. Survived longer in the arena game, down to priority order if needed

8P OLO Tournaments

  1. Points in lost games. Points are CPs tagged plus bots who died before the phase in which you die.
  2. Lives remaining
  3. Points in all games.

Series Pool Seeding

8P Tournaments

The top pool each round is the championship pool. Bots that qualify for this pool are the previous round's pool winners, plus enough top finishers from the previous round's championship pool to total 8 bots. If not all qualifying bots join the new tournament then the missing bots are the highest scoring championship-pool bots or the highest scoring non-championship-pool bots from the previous round.

4P Tournaments

The top pool each round is the championship pool. The next 3 pool are qualifying pools. The championship pool for each round is made up of the winners of these four pools in the previous round. The qualifying pools are made up from the previous round by taking the rest of the championship pool, the lower pool winners, and the 2nd place finishers from the qualifying pools. Remaining spots in the qualifying pools are filled from 3rd place qualifying pools and 2nd place lower pools.

For 8P and 4P tournaments bots are distributed in each level based on 6+ or 3-5 ranking to create balanced pools.

Ejection

Tournament games generally have time limits of 15 days, plus 3 days per move. Ejections are encouraged when timers run out and the tournament will be delayed.