Apparently there's a daily batch crunch of the portfolio of hands and tournaments for the approximately 30 days of tournaments that are online.
Not only is that a lot of data manipulation it produces strange anomalies that will occasionally nail the most scrupulous of BBO'ers.
Consider this scenario:
- MrEverready spends 5 weeks exploring the Kalahari desert.
- While playing the first tournament since returning, the power goes out.
- When order is restored, he wants to try out Geo USA for the first time.
- No can do. His completion rate is 0%.
OK, I'm being extreme here. But a similar less dramatic fiction arose in my numbers. I needed to leave one Automated tourney (which I did via the withdrawal/replacement mechanism).
Even though I had missed exactly one tournament which was receding into the past, my tournament completion rate kept dropping. Why? Because over the holidays I had fewer partners to play with and I got addicted to the bonus on Robot Rebate 55%. That just doesn't make sense.
But there's an easier way, one that never lies and can be kept updated in real time:
- Store the best available proxy for completion rate for a player. For me, say, 98%.
- When ANY tournament is completed, add one to the completion rate if it isn't already 100.
- When a FREE tournament, with a HUMAN director, is exited prior to completion, decrement the completion rate, if it is above 0.
- (Yes, I'm assuming that paying to play should give you the right to forfeit your entry as a sufficient punishment. Further proof is that there are plenty of subs ready to try to earn BBO points for free.)
A similar issue arises with the board completion rate, one that showed up for me because I rarely play in the Main Club. But because of the data window, I did have data, but now I do not. That, too, seems silly and could be addressed by a similar strategy.