[Fluffy]

One of my friends has a very large database of great card play problems, they are good because they don't require deep finesse, yet they are complex enough for advanced an experts.
He has been using them to train the Spannish national team for the European Championships this year, and they all have had a lot of fun.
Now we are thinking on putting the hands on my website and run a public contest, perhaps with a small entry fee (we are still debating this point).
I am looking for ideas on how to run the contest, I can make the hands playable, and could even implement a way for those dodgy queens to swap hands if the line played is bad.

But the problem with this is that after you play the hand you know the full hand, so reentering the contest with another ID and making al the right plays shouldn't be hard.

Another option is to ask for a written line of play, that way at the end of the contest you have some commentaries that you can work with, and there is no access to the full hand untill the end. This is good, but it looks too much like pavlicek's contests in my opinion, maybe he wouldn't mind though.

When he trained the spannish team there was a time limit for all problems (about half an hour for 6 hands), and I think it improved the experience, but time limit has another cheating problem, you can take the contest, think again, and then reenter with all the hands thought.

So what do you guys think?

[diana_eva]

Maybe randomize several sets of hands, so that even if someone enters with a new ID they get a different set of problems?

[Zelandakh]

The only way I could think of to prevent the cheating would be to require someone's name and NBO membership number and have a way of checking that these match. Even then 2 or more players could get together and work as a team, a husband and wife for example. So I am not sure you can ever guarantee a fair contest. That said, if the idea is to make money then perhaps the issue of cheating is not so important providing you get enough entries. If the idea is rather to help improve the standard of visitors to your site then offering it free or for a nominal cost without a prize might be a better option.

[nige1]

Fluffy, on 2014-May-08, 05:03, said:

But the problem with this is that after you play the hand you know the full hand, so reentering the contest with another ID and making al the right plays shouldn't be hard.

• You could insist that entrants use their BBO id or ACBL/EBU/SBU/... registration number (as Zelandakh suggested).
• As well as randomly selecting hands you could present them in random order (As Diana_Eva suggested),
• As well as specifying a time-limit, you could try defining the same (time-zone adjusted) start-time for all entrants.
• As soon as a competitor made a mistake, you could fail him on that board.
• You could prevent competitors from seeing the full hands and explanations until the whole competition was over.

[diana_eva]

FWIW I think you shouldn't lose much sleep over cheating issues. The site is still new and I suppose your aim is to spread it, so for this first attempt there's no need to make things hard on players interested to participate. I dislike the NBO number requirement, there are many players out there who aren't NBO members (me included) so they wouldn't have a number to submit for verification. Real name and an email address should do for start IMO. Maybe some way to hide as much info as possible about the hands too, until the contest is over.

[kenberg]

Diana already made a key point of what I want to say, but anyway:

I would participate.

I would pay a reasonable entry fee. I worry some about security in such transactions, so you have to think that though.

Are you planning a cash prize, is that why you are worried about cheating? If there is no significant sum of cash involved then I think cheating on such a contest is a reasonable definition of pathetic. Which doesn't quite mean it wouldn't happen but it does mean, as Diana says, you should not let it interfere with a good idea.

[Fluffy]

The main decision I have to make right now is if I make the hands playable, or I ask for a written line, written line gives you some material to make a good job when presenting the results commenting on the lines proposed etc, but as I said I am afraid it would look pretty much like pavlicek's.

I just though a way to "hide" the solution from people who have already taken the contest, I could make inferior lines succeed, so people wouldn't know they have actually failed when they made the hand. I think this is better than stopping the play as soon as you fail, people want to go through the end, a beginner told me recently that he didn't like that my articles followed some lines to stop when 3-5 cards were left. He wanted the play to go through the end...

[Fluffy]

kenberg, on 2014-May-08, 07:48, said:

Diana already made a key point of what I want to say, but anyway:

I would participate.

I would pay a reasonable entry fee. I worry some about security in such transactions, so you have to think that though.

Are you planning a cash prize, is that why you are worried about cheating? If there is no significant sum of cash involved then I think cheating on such a contest is a reasonable definition of pathetic. Which doesn't quite mean it wouldn't happen but it does mean, as Diana says, you should not let it interfere with a good idea.

Prizes will probably be meaningless, perhaps some online lessons with me or my friend, or something like. The paying methods is what worries me the most, I need a really good and safe way to do them, also one that don't get 1.5$ minimum from a transaction of 3$ or so

[diana_eva]

Fluffy, on 2014-May-08, 08:09, said:

Prizes will probably be meaningless, perhaps some online lessons with me or my friend, or something like. The paying methods is what worries me the most, I need a really good and safe way to do them, also one that don't get 1.5$ minimum from a transaction of 3$ or so

google wallet and paypal are the most common as far as I know, and fairly easy to implement. I don't know what fees they have though. Worth looking into it and perhaps add both options, since people tend to dislike opening yet another safe transfer account only to join a contest.

[Antrax]

Can't we all just send our money to rhm and call it a day?