Domino Stone
So how did we do? I got back home too late to register and the results have already been removed.
SCHEDULE FOR THIS QUARTER
If you already have a new calendar for 2020, mark every Wednesday at 9pm ET and every Sunday at 7pm ET for the 1st quarter with the EXCEPTION OF:
February 12 and February 16
We will take these two days off from our regular tournament play and on one or both of these days, we will hold a special tournament. More on this later.
So again this quarter, there will be a total of 12 tournaments on Wednesday and 12 tournaments on Sunday. We’ll be playing 6 consecutive Wednesdays and 6 consecutive Sundays, then we’ll take a one-week break, and then we’ll play 6 more consecutive weeks.
TOURNAMENT PARTICIPATION
Please send me a message if you plan to play in only our Wednesday tournaments or only our Sunday tournaments during the 1st quarter.
I came 2nd won 500k in chips in Sundays Domino Stone
disappointed I didn’t win it truth be known 
as I was leading throughout the tourn for ages
happy with 2nd had I won it it would have been my 51st MTT win
i will be playing both days this quarter, a last minute change for night classes last quarter kept me out of most wed. games
how do i join
Here is a quote & a link…https://forum.casino.org/t/the-only-way-to-play-with-the-donks/13447
Blockquote
REPLY TO trickytee
Thank you for your interest in joining our league. There are 3 requirements to join our league:
- You must be nominated by a current member.of the Donks Leagues.
- You must have a Replay ranking of 3000 or better.
- You must commit to play in at least half of either of our weekly tournaments.
Good job, JuiceeLoot!
The only thing I could add, is that we now have 120 total members and 3 different tiered leagues and 3 leaderboards for each league.
Thanks for helping.
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Ha Ha I beat you by 1 second
To answer your question, I don’t think we fared very well, despite Tomcat’s great finish. I did my best to lovelakelive up to his request to make the final two tables and I think I finished 17th lol. Right after KO, I checked and there were maybe 2-3 Donks left out of about 12 originals in a field of 55ish. Does that sound about right, Tomcat?(or anyone else). Either way, we did not exactly dominate. We’ll have to try again some other time.
I think there were 5 of us at the final table. Galak finished 5th, Top Set was 6th, Seville 7th and Horse-man 8th
4th QUARTER OF 2019 ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Happy New Year of the New Decade.
On the final day of each quarter, we reflect on what our league has accomplished since last quarter. Here are some of those accomplishments:
- Our most significant milestone is that we started a 3rd separate league and eliminated registration passwords (remember that hassle?)
- Our leagues have grown to 120 members while limiting our tournament run time to about 2 hours.
- For the first time, 9 virtual crowns were earned by and awarded to leaderboard champions to be displayed on their Donks avatar image and optionally used as Replay profile photos.
- We established the Hee Hawl of Fame in which we now have 6 new members for a total of 20 inductees.
- We advanced the 8 best Silver Donks and 6 best Bronze Donks to the next upper tier.
Good luck to all in the 1st quarter and thank you for helping us make our uniquely elite league a tremendous success.
Be sure to check this space tomorrow, when we’ll be making some major announcements regarding our goals for the 1st quarter of 2020.
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MISSION STATEMENT AND GOALS FOR THE 1st QUARTER:
We shall enable our members to significantly improve their game by endeavoring to emulate real money tournaments by being the most elite group of poker leagues on any free poker site on the internet.
Each quarter, we recommit to our mission statement and state our new goals for the subsequent quarter. These goals have been defined after considering ideas that were submitted by our members and after consulting with our anonymous advisory board. Upon completion of this process, we are committing to accomplish these goals in pursuit of our mission statement.
This quarter we shall:
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Reduce or eliminate the leaderboard disadvantages for those members who are only able to play in one of our weekly tournaments.
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Reduce the necessity to participate in every single tournament to finish high on the leaderboards.
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Provide an opportunity for those who play in 75% or more of our tournaments to be moderately rewarded for their participation.
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Reduce or eliminate the need for registering but then not playing in our tournaments.
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Determine whether our members want to continue the added point incentive for the final week of tournaments of the quarter.
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Maintain a tournament run time of not more than about 2 hours.
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Continue to recruit to achieve a better league balance with no more than 45 members in each league.
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Determine how to establish a chip pool to be awarded quarterly to our leaderboard champions.
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Establish a Donk tournament of champions competition and consider having it be a quarterly event.
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Improve the social interaction of our membership so that we are all more familiar with the other members.
WE’RE GETTING STARTED ON THESE GOALS NOW!!!
Goals 1 thru 5 required that we develop a better leaderboard point system. After running a multitude of tests on a number of different point systems, the following leaderboard changes will become effective on January 1:
a) All 3 leaderboards will be based on the average points instead of the total points earned in tournaments.
b) All 3 leaderboards will average only the best 9 tournament results and disregard those remaining.
c) All 3 leaderboards will award zero points for missed tournaments except for the cases described in d) and e) below…
d) Any member who never plays on Sundays will not receive zero points for not participating on Sundays.
e) Any member who never plays on Wednesdays will not receive zero points for not participating on Wednesdays.
f) The best 6 Silver and Bronze Donks will advance to the next tier. They will be the top 2 from each of the respective leaderboards. See the leaderboard for details.
g) The bottom 6 of the Composite Leaderboard of the Golden and Silver Leagues will be relegated to the next lower tier.
h) We have surveyed our membership and determined that more of us want to continue the use of our 150% multiplier formula in order to keep more members in the running up to the final week of the quarter. Although not all members responded to our survey, only 5% of our members expressed a desire to remove the multiplier from our points formula.
We will work on goals 6 thru 10 during the quarter and periodically post the status of each on our Forum.
During the 1st quarter, we will play every Sunday and Wednesday at the regular times
except for February 12 and February 16
We will take these two days off from our regular tournament play.
Good luck in the new quarter and the New Year!
I will be on a cruise from the 18th February until the 16th March 2020. Normally when I’m on holidays I would still play the 2 Donks League games per week if I could but this time that won’t be possible as my internet access will be very limited.
As a result I can only play 7 of 12 Wednesday Games and 8 of 12 Sunday Games (assuming that I can make every other game which is a big ask) so I will be handicapped and the handicap may in fact greater than it would have otherwise been! Funnily enough if Feb 12 and 16 were normal games my handicap would be considerably reduced.
Please don’t get me wrong. I fully understand that the league cannot be organised to suit 1 persons circumstances and I accept that situation. I have merely raised the scenario in case it is something you have not considered or something which is worthy of consideration.
REPLY TO FLASHLIGHT
Thank you for your post. We’re sorry you’ll be absent for so many of our tournaments, but are envious of your cruising 
. Perhaps your absence will give us all a better chance to finish higher than you on the leaderboard this quarter. 
We have looked closely at this scenario and are convinced that although you will be at a bit of a disadvantage compared to a member who can participate in 9 or more tournaments this quarter, your disadvantage is not nearly as severe as it would have been under the old system. This is because we are taking an average of only your best 9 of 12 tournaments, so you will receive 1 zero for the Sunday Leaderboard and 2 zeroes for the Wednesday leaderboard for your absences. Under the old system, you would have received 4 zeroes for the Sunday Board and 5 zeroes for the Wednesday Board. So the absences would have had a greater impact on your standings.
Thank you again for your post, because this is a unique scenario, but we are still convinced that the new system is much superior for fairness than the old system. Feel free to send a message to further evaluate this scenario.
It is not surprising that changes don’t make everyone happy. You really can never make everyone happy.
To make a good system, there are a multitude of factors that need to be considered balanced in order to achieve the goals of the league. Our goals are: Good participation and high quality play, fairness in rankings, advancement, and relegation.
We strive to make this balance of factors optimal, but inevitably there are tradeoffs and compromises, due to conflicts between two or more mutually exclusive goals.
We prototyped around a dozen different ideas for an improved leaderboard system, and Badonkidonk and I feel that what we’ve come up with was the best. That said, we are always looking for problems and potential problems, and we love to get feedback from our members so that we can consider even more perspectives than we can see by ourselves.
In your specific case, @flashlight, I think you will find that you still have a good shot at placing high on the Composite leaderboard, and you will do much better on it than you could have with the former sum-based method. You will still manage to play in at least 9 of our tournaments over the course of Q1, and your best 9 tournament points will be summed to create your Composite board average. Even though your vacation schedule will prevent you from being able to play in at least 9 of 12 on Sunday OR Wednesday, you will still accumulate a full 9 overall for the Composite board. Depending on how well you do in your best 9 games, your average may well be right up there with the top averages of the league, and it’s very conceivable that you could win the Composite board crown.
Under the old system, missing even a few games generally put players out of contention, even if they were high finishers in the games that they played. As well, we noticed that due to the relegation rules, some players were signing up for games and then not playing them, because appearing on the tournament’s roster would net more tournament points than not appearing on the roster. Some of our players are only available to play one night a week, which put them at a severe disadvantage since they were unavailable to take advantage of half of the opportunities to earn tournament points. A few realized that, rather than accept this and take 0 points, if they registered for the games but didn’t seat for them, they were still getting tournament points for the “ghost appearance”, and this amounted on average to an extra 6000-ish points per game, or +72000 points on the Composite leaderboard over a 24-game quarter.
Yes, being eliminated from a game due to not playing a hand cuts these players off, but they still appear on the board. While Replay may not award them points, our leaderboard system is not connected directly to Replay, which means that we are unable to determine with 100% certainty when players ghost vs. play and bust early. We can observe it directly if we happen to be seated at the table, but since we cannot observe all tables, there’s no 100% effective way to detect ghosting.
The downside of ghosting is that it distorts play strategy at the table, since there will be 1.5BB of undefended blinds at the table, which in turn gives a considerable advantage to the player sitting to the right of the ghost player, and to counteract this advantage the other players at the table are then given an incentive to play extra aggressive preflop during the hands when the ghost is in the BB and SB seat, in order to try to steal those blinds.
So, that gave rise to this situation:
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We’re seeing about 75%-80% attendance at Gold tier, with 43 members, so a typical MTT is ~30 players.
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We wanted to create leagues sized to create tournaments that run for ideally no more than 2.0 hours
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Our current games are running 2.0-2.5 hours with ~30 players. Broad consensus among membership is that an average tournament run time of >2 hours is not desirable, for a variety of reasons.
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We could have tried to adjust the run time of tournaments by adjusting the blinds structure, making them quicker or steeper, but either one of these solutions would tend to turn the endgame that rewards luck more than skill.
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We can’t promote from the under tiers and not demote from the bottom of the upper tier to make room for the incoming players, because the upper tiers will grow to a size that makes games run longer than desired.
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The system used for demotion was unfair to 1/week players, since they have only half the potential to earn tournament points over the quarter.
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The system put pressure on everyone to have perfect attendance if you wanted to contend for advancement or to win a Crown. While we want good attendance, we don’t believe that a recreational poker league – with no actual money on the line – should be this demanding of our time. Everyone would like to feel like missing a game or two over the course of the quarter won’t ruin their chances of contending for a top slot. There’s plenty of things more important in life than winning a for-fun poker league: family obligations, other obligations, vacations, health, etc.
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For a player who typically is only available to participate on one night/week, we didn’t want a ranking system that would disincentive them from playing in an occasional game on their off-night if they happened to be available to play once in a while.
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We built the system to utilize a player’s Best 9 scores to allow them to miss as many as 3 games (per weekday), which is 75% of the games held, which mirrors the ~75% attendance we’re seeing from the league membership overall. This gives players incentive to play in as many games as they can, while not creating a stringent requirement to make your life revolve around the league schedule in order to have a chance at contending for the crowns.
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We switched to an average-based approach to reward consist high performers, and to remove any possible incentive for “ghosting” tournaments. Ghosting now harms your average, period.
We have multiple ways to contend for Crown and/or advancement:
- Play exclusively Sun or Wed, and try for the Sun or Wed crown, by playing in at least 9 of 12 tournaments. You’ll also have a shot at the Composite crown, and actually a better shot at it than you would have under the old sum-based system with 1/week players missing 1/2 of potential tournament points unless they ghost.
- Play both Sun and Wed, and try for all three crowns.
- If you can’t play in 9/12 games on either day, you can still make a run at the Composite crown if you can make at least 9/24 games over the whole quarter. 9/24 is still less than the 12/24 games we’re supposed to commit to in order to join the league.
Considering all the above, we feel that the new system will serve the league very well, and better than the old system.
We’d love to continue to improve the system, if we see a need or opportunity to do so, and we will make changes based on member feedback and observation, as needed, revising the system at most each quarter.
Thanks for the feedback, and good luck at the tables.
Thank you for the explanation, puggywug.
Good luck to all Donks
reply to flashlight. flashlight i am actually excited for you. i firmly believe we have prepared you well for cruise ship poker play. it will be interesting to see if your donk play has prepared you for real money play on the cruise ship. please let us know how you do. we will not even charge you a coaching fee.
As someone who normally only plays on wednesday, but found a way to get in for a couple sundays last quarter, I’m trying to understand if there is any advantage or disadvantage/penalty if I get in for a Sunday tournament here and there? Does it make me more likely to be relegated if i only have a couple sunday scores rather than none at all?