Monday, December 25, 2017

site updated so Elo is computed using team Elo rating in ranked games

This morning, the site was updated with a few bug fixes and modifications.

First, the Elo rating has been slightly modified in team games (Spades, Twenty-Nine, Euchre, and Double Deck Pinochle). You won't see much of a change when players with similar ranks are playing against each other. However, if a player with a higher Elo is teamed up with one who has a much lower rating, then the higher rated player will get a little more credit than they did previously. The details are explained on the page which describes Spades rankings. This should help to mitigate the risk of teaming up with a lower-rated partner in ranked team games. Thanks to the player who suggested this to me!

The hand history is now available for Gin Rummy (there's a blog post that describes how the hand history works for Hearts). I've had a couple of bug reports in this game, but have not been able to reproduce the issues. So if you notice a problem, please download the hand history and send it to me. It may help me figure out what is going wrong here

Someone mentioned to me that the Pinochle bots have not been giving an "aces around" bid. If a player has "aces around", it means they have at least one ace in all suits, and indicates a pretty strong hand. If no one has bid yet, a bid of 51 (rather than the minimum bid of 50) is usually taken to signal that the person has "aces around". The bots have been programmed to do this, now.
I'm first to bid, so I'll bid 51, because I have aces around. Now the bots will too!
This update also includes some bug fixes for problems that were reported to me in Twenty-Nine. If you notice any more problems in this game, please report them so that I can make the site better.

Monday, December 11, 2017

site outage

Thanks to everyone who reported the outage tonight! I'm really sorry about that... There was a problem at the server and I had to restart it. So far as I can tell, everything is running smoothly now. Please let me know if you notice any other problems.