Hi!
"All the features and the possibilities are fantastic! You give the serious player all the tools to improve his/her strength. - Pim"
https://heroes.backgammonstudio.com/
With many features there can be some confusion about how everything works. Luckily David Sanders came to the rescue and created a user guide: User Guide
Thanks a lot!
Tournament Backgammon
The other day I was asked for some input on which server to pick for tournament backgammon. I ended up with this:
What makes Heroes superior to other sites when it comes to tournament play?
One is the basic feature of making sure matches are stored and can be resumed later if they have to be aborted/paused for whatever reason.
Another is finding opponents. Playing casual games against anyone this isn't so important but for tournaments you want to be able to easily find your tournament opponents.
Heroes offers many options to find your opponent.
The users list can be sorted alphabetically so you can scroll through it and see if you find your opponent.
If you play a local city tournament you can switch to your city room and all your opponents should be present.
If you play a regional or national tournament you can switch to your country room.
You can use the search feature to find a named opponent.
But what if you don't exactly know what alias Bob uses?
This is where it is useful to have a chat you can ask in.
There is a public chat, country chat, city chat and several others. "Hi Bob! Are you here? What is your alias?"...
You can open chats with players either directly with your friends or send a request for a chat with other players. These can be opened either from the match challenge dialog or chat buttons found in the public chat when your friends log in.
For the tournament manager it is nice to have a chat to inform players about important information. "The draw has been made! Check {url} for your opponent".
If you run an internal single elimination tournament things are even easier as the chat will report matchups and the tournament dialog will allow you to click on the opponent button where you can start the match.
As a tournament manager you may want to see that all matches have started. If it is run as an internal tournament you can check the eye icons in the tournament dialog which shows that the match has started.
For externally run tournaments you can filter the live matches list on match length as your matches typically will all have the same length. Turning on showing flags in live matches can also help.
And this is just for starters... 😀
External tournament rooms
Another good reason is that external tournaments can have a separate tournament room for all players in the tournament. This comes with a chat which only goes to these players.
These rooms can set up restrictions on what type of match and other match options you can challenge other players to. This makes it easier to set up the correct match settings without doing it yourself.
Various match clocks can be used some which imposes special restrictions. For instance if you are worried that the computer feedback observers get can be abused then you can disable this. Not happy with any of the clock options? Just ask and I'll create a new one for you.
There is also support for invitational rooms where the tournament manager manually invites players to the room. This is perhaps a bit more tedious but if you need strict rules who can enter the room then this is for you. Drag&Drop players into an Invited Players dialog to add players.
This is a work in progress feature and I plan to make it possible for the tournament admin to dynamically change all these match options.
Internal tournament support
The server currently supports single elimination tournaments which several clubs has started using. There are various options you have as a tournament manager:
Or you can join the many automatically generated tournaments which are created based on the number and location for players having set tournament ready flag. Lots of good fun in these!
The matches where you see an eye button are currently playing. Click on the button to observe the match. This can be useful for a tournament manager to see if all matches has started or not.
In other news
There are some pretty cool tournaments running on Heroes. WBIF has several and this one is pretty sweet:
https://heroes.backgammonstudio.com/
Stay safe! Be a Hero! Join today!
Awesome! 😀
Best regards,
TP