[mythdoc]

Quote

And then 2 years ago we realized deal security can be enhanced and premium games made extremely cheat resistant with the introduction of “Deal Pool” games. Deal pool means in a given tournament, there may be 20 or so instances of board 1, 2, 3 etc, so your board 1 may not be the same as your friend’s. It’s like taking the SATs or GMATs, kinda, sorta. We refine this concept for our big event, the NABC but I don’t want to really publish all details here. 🙂 Games with deal pools are as safe as they can get, from the security point of view.

<above quote from BBO online, 2019>

It is very hard to find information about how Deal Pool works, other than it is an “anti-cheating measure.” So far, so good. I have a simple question: are there any other filters involved in the selection of hands for the deal pool that are used for purposes other than anti cheating? For instance, and specifically, is there any attempt to promote hands that generate a wider spread of results at matchpoints or IMPs, and to demote hands that generate flat boards? This might be done in the name of making daylong tournaments “fairer,” for instance, I couldn’t say. But I’d very much like to know the answer to this question.

Thanks in advance.

[hrothgar]

BBO has stated on numerous occasions that, with the exception of "best hand" typi considerations, they do not bias the hand results for the tournaments that they sponsor.

Some individuals who run tournaments do, however, chose to bias hands (for example, ghoulash type tournaments)

[hrothgar]

Quote

Games with deal pools are as safe as they can get, from the security point of view.

This last statement is absolute nonsense

It should be viewed as badly conceived marketing fluff and is a discredit to the company

[hrothgar]

At the most basic level, deal pools refer to a situation in which a single tournament uses a very large number of boards.
Individual players only play a small subset of the available total

Hypothetically, you might have a situation in which people are play 27 boards
BBO would generate a total of 1350 boards in total

If you went and played the tournament, you'd only see 2% of total boards
Therefore, if you passed these boards to a friend (or entered a second time using a different user ID), you'd only expect to have an "edge"on 2% of the boards in this next match

[mythdoc]

Ok, thanks, and just to clarify: by “flat” I didn’t mean flat distribution of suits, I meant flat outcomes where almost everyone is in 3NT making 10 tricks, for example, or for that matter, 4H off two. Any outcome that is flat on the scoresheet.

[mythdoc]

Upon further rumination, I appear to be unsure about the choice of the word “pool.” The word suggests a preexisting supply, which conjures some kind of curation process.

If all that is meant is “partial duplicate field scoring,” or similar, why not just say that?

[barmar]

What we mean by "pool" is just "collection". I'm not sure where you inferred curation from -- the pools are filled randomly, with the only cooking being the "best hand" feature.