Bwild: Yes, I succeed in doing it with friends but sometimes, I've enough to ask this.
And friends often say yes because they are kind with me, but they can be bad players and do not like the game.
We come back to what Purple said : people try to keep their rating the most higher possible, so a neutral program for training would be great.

Mélusine: you can set games up to be unrated for practice.

Bwild: Yes, the variants are very .
I just regret that here, we don't have a programme for people who want discover a game or else practise.
I'm sure I would play more games, especially variants of checkers.

Mélusine: I have to agree with you. I'm terrible at some games...but I like to play,and I learn from the more experienced players who are willing to give me the time.
chess and checkers is tough,due to the large number of program players..but the variants are great fun.

Purple: I agree, it's not fair from him to reject a game with you, but I think we must not impose an opponent on someone : he must be free to play with you or not.
Nobody is dupe ; we often see, here, people who aren't fair (example : people who send an invitation to someone else just for raising their BKR).
Me, I look at my rating, just to see the games where I have to progress, and just to have an idea, but I don't want to be prisoner of this rating, I don't forget that, 1st, I'm here for fun.

Aganju: TY. I don't like to beat up on a bunch of less skilled players just to get to him but I may have to do it.

Purple: I checked, he is playing Checkers in many of the small tournaments. You could just enter yourself into one of those.

happyjuggler0: Not that "It's Your Turn" is any role model but their ladders work beautifully. This is a better site but they have better ladders.

Folks, you need to be careful before putting this type of "stairs" thing into BK rules for non-stairs games; there are all kinds of potential nasty unintended consequences.

For example, this could inspire people to change their settings to not accept invitations.

Another downside is wanting to limit number of ongoing games (for non-rooks) in order to make space for a tournament you want to play in, but too many people want to invite you to games and you are forced to accept.

Similarly you might be trying to clear up your remaining games to go on a playing hiatus (a vacation or just to not get burned out on a particular game).

Another potential problem is being forced to play time controls you don't want to play, or match lengths you don't want to play, or single game invitations where your opponent has the side that has a huge advantage (e.g. battleboats plus).

Right now I have a few players on my blocked users list because they were abusive or obnoxious in some other way. I would hate to be forced to play them.

I'm sure there are other potential problems that others can think of. Anyway, I hope Fencer would be very careful before implementing any such "reform" to make sure it doesn't hurt more than it helps.

I have had similar problems with players who are number one ranked while I was number two ranked who refused to play me. It is frustrating. Fortunately for me though none of those rating differences were insurmountable the way the rating difference in checkers is....

Thom27: Even a loss would not lose him enough points to drop out of first place..it would just be much closer.

Herlock Sholmes:
maybe this could work:
If an invitation is refused where both players have an established rating and the inviter has the lower rating and the rating difference is not all too big and the refuser has no good excuse (like being a pawn and playing the full number of games) and the players do not already play a game of this type or have played one short ago,
then the ratings of the players are updated as if the game was played and had ended in a draw.

Purple: I think Bobby Fisher and Alekhine played the same "game" with others. They were the greatest after all. But in this case, maybe there should be some kind of provision or rule that the first guy cannot refuse playing the second one ? What do you think ?

Resher: For example I am #2 rated checkers BKR but can NEVER be #1 because the top guy will not play me..he only plays those he can beat and he can not beat me. So there is no way out.

Resher: Ah yes, I see. Thank you.

Mélusine:Yes, use the Statistics tab on the left-hand menu

Is there's a list with the average BKR of each player ?
I mean with all the players together, because I know we have our result on our profile.

When the number of players increases, the number of winners goes down.
Of course, it's more difficult to win a tournament with a big number of players, and I think that this result has more value.

happyjuggler0, Resher: Thank you to you both.

Resher: Doh! I looked at that list too, but I thought the first column meant something else.

I guess my list is a list of winners of public tournaments, while yours is a list of winners of any tournament.

Mélusine: Found it!

http://brainking.com/en/TournamentWinners?tp=0&mipl=4&submit=Show

This is from the "Winners" tab, then change minimum number of players to 4.

Mélusine: Unfortunately I had to construct it manually; I don't think there is an accessible list at BK.

I started here, which is a list of those who won 1000 or more tournaments. Then I looked up each name and ranked them myself.

http://brainking.com/en/Achievements?aid=64&submit=Submit&p=1

happyjuggler0: Where is this list ? I'd like to see my rating.

aaru: 3875
Gammonator: 3049
Borowitz: 2710
FrancescoLR: 2380
cd power: 1793
AlterMann: 1413
Pioneer54: 1194
DeaD man WalkiN: 1188

Resher:

Gabriel Almeida: Aaru's on 3875 tournament wins! 

Can anyone beat this?

Gabriel Almeida: All 3 (Tenuki, Martinez and you) are players very strong. I'm sure that the average of your BKR is higher than mine.

Mélusine: me too! But tenuki or Martinez have... Hummm... A few more than i have! 1 or 2 more... :)

Aganju: I've just a few more than you.

Aganju:

high five

Yippie! 100 won tournaments!

pedestrian and Hrqls: Thanks for your help.

MissDelish:

welcome back kiddo

JungleBurger: you can buy a paid membership with brains

JungleBurger: You can use brains to play in prize tournaments that offer brains as a prize... I think that's pretty much it.

MissDelish: Am I your doc?

Roberto Silva: I haven't played any games on here in over 12 months hahahaha....I am thinking of buying a membership :)

MissDelish: cos you're too addicted to online boarding games?

(V): really?? why can't I sleep and it is pitch dark??

hello all ;P) have just returned after a long absence.

What do brains do for you on this site?.. What do you get out of it pls?

Roberto Silva: Light (mainly blue light ) stops melatonin production which is part of the system for regulating our sleep cycle.

El Cid: Yes, there was a change in Mainland Portugal (not so in the islands) from GMT to CET around the time the Schengen Area was implemented, so as to keep the same time zone as most Schengen Area countries, resulting in the Mainland being 1 hour ahead of Madeira and 2 hours ahead of Azores. Though we didn't actually stop DST, we just didn't reverse DST in winter that year, making it the new standard time - the following years adopted DST normally, just one hour ahead.

They quickly moved it back as, since people were going to work in the dark, they were more tired in early morning and employers reported a decrease in productivity as a result. All the regulations in the world won't reform biology: human beings have an innate tendency to feel more sleepy when it's dark and to have trouble sleeping when there's too much light.

Nowadays, most compies run their servers on zulu or universal time (formerly called Greenwich Mean Time), without any DST. Thats makes administrating it easier.
That has nothing to do with the issue here - different people have weeked at different times. Nothing can be done about that, because the earth is round, not flat.
the server could consider everone's time zone, but that has ugly side effects: I have still weekend while you haven't, so you lose games against me on time while I don't have to even move at all. Friday night it's reversed of course. Also people could cheat another 'weekend day' out by setting their time zone to the earlest one (australia?) on Friday, so their weekend starts early, and on Sun change it to the latest zone (Hawaii or whatever).
All ugly, so not good.

DST is *not* about saving energy, that idea was abandoned in the sixties (just an urban legend now).
It is about saving lives, and improving quality of life!
A) saving lives: after the DST switch, some people now have to drive in the dark, which results in more accidents, which results in more dead. In the evening, the result is the reverse. More people drive in the evening than in the morning, so the net effect is some lives saved per day.
B) Quality of life: even though everybody complains when DST starts (and again when it ends), generally people enjoy an hour more of sunlight in the evening.
Read wikipedia for more.

I am in New Zealand and have this problem as well.  We just changed back from DST on the weekend(coming into winter here), and I've had to change my time zone to show the correct time.  I usually have to adjust it several times a year depending on whether it is us in NZ changing, or the server chaning to/from DST.  At one stage I have to just have the wrong time cos there is no option to show the right time - hard to explain but NZ shows as GMT +12 hours, and with the inconsistencies with DST changing we are sometimes at GMT +13hrs, but there is no option to change to that.  I have gotten used to it in the 7 odd years I have been using this site, and just make sure I keep up with games.

El Cid: It is worth pointing out that in the study I referred to, that before Indiana changed the rules, a few counties in Indiana didn't have DST while others did. Therefore when they changed the rules they could measure the changed energy output in the affected counties while also having a control group.

It is the control group which is the key that makes it convincing.

happyjuggler0: Actually, in 1990s there was a year in Portugal when we didn't change the hour in one of the clock changes, to have the same hour as the rest of the Europe if I0m not mistaken (maybe Roberto remembers it better than me), I think it caused several problems like everyone going to work still with dark night.and in the Summer we had daylight until almost 10pm (when the "normal" is a sunset at 9pm or 9.15pm. Whatever was the case, it was a single year, so... we had that "study" and it didn't work...

If it's not the programmers fault that time on this site is displayed improperly, then whose fault is it? ;-)

Thad: After reading your question I tried to think of who else might somehow be responsible. Living in the US, depending on who you talk to, it seems like *everything* is either Obama's fault or Bush's fault.

happyjuggler0: Obama's fault. Funny! ;-)

In my case, though, I still think it's Fencer's fault because although he actually implements DST for the US pretty well, I live in Hawaii, which is one of the two states that doesn't observe DST and Fencer hasn't taken that into account in his programming.

Roberto Silva: Not if everyone followed Obama's leadership!

Seriously though, if the US eliminated DST because of a careful academic study, then everyone else would surely either eliminate it too, or at least conduct a similar experiment in their own country.

Anyway, all it would take is for the Czechs to also eliminate DST, and then thisbeme would need another scapegoat for why he times out.

Note to whom it may concern, if you find yourself timing out a lot, it is your own fault, not BK's. The occasional timeout may *perhaps* not be your fault, but habitual timeouts certainly are your own fault.