Author Topic: Seating Players and Balanced Tables  (Read 4110 times)

Seitz333

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Seating Players and Balanced Tables
« on: April 08, 2015, 01:42:28 AM »
About 30 min before my players arrive I setup a tourney with the expected players (30-40) using 4 tables. I usually have about 4 sets of players that I want to have start the tourney at different tables because they are brothers or husband wife etc. I manually seat them randomly at different tables before buying them in (using all 4 tables). What I would like for the TD software to do is as I buy in each of the remaining 30ish players is randomly seat them BUT keep the tables balanced based on the number of tables being used. Reason is I get a few late arrivals and I don't want to start the tourney with unbalanced tables and have to manually move someone before the tourney starts. Make sense?

Chuck

Corey Cooper

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Re: Seating Players and Balanced Tables
« Reply #1 on: April 08, 2015, 05:02:17 PM »
You can't randomly seat at buy-in and keep the tables balanced.  The balancing algorithm would try to put all players at the same table at first, then split them up between two tables when the 11th player bought in, then three tables after 21 players bought in, etc.  Without knowing how many players will be ultimately playing (and hence how many tables will be needed), you really can't effectively balance the players.  If you balance the players among 4 tables, you may end up only needing 3 and you'd have to move those players on the 4th table before starting.  If you balance the players among 3 tables and ultimately need 4, you have to reseat everyone or else the last [up to 10] players to buy-in all end up at the same table.

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Reason is I get a few late arrivals and I don't want to start the tourney with unbalanced tables and have to manually move someone before the tourney starts.

This is specifically what you cannot do without knowing exactly how many players will be playing.  If you know that, then just randomly seat them before the tournament.  Otherwise, if you know the maximum players you'll have (say 40), then I would seat them at buy-in among 4 tables, and reduce before the tournament starts if you have to.

Lafrog

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Re: Seating Players and Balanced Tables
« Reply #2 on: August 05, 2015, 03:14:34 PM »
That said though, when we run weekly tourneys we do get a feel on how many players we get for any given day (the same way we know how many dealers to schedule).

Wouldn't it be possible to tell TD how many tables we "plan on using" and have it work off of that?

An example for a 4 tables "forecast"

TABLE 1TABLE 2TABLE 3TABLE 4
1st Entry
3rd Entry
9th Entry
13th Entry
17th Entry
2nd Entry
4th Entry
10th Entry
14th Entry
18th Entry
...
5th Entry
6th Entry
11th Entry
15th Entry
19th Entry
7th Entry
8th Entry
12th Entry
16th Entry
20th Entry
Furthermore, I would love it if TD could assign seats "as far away from the dealer as possible" like in order 5-6-4-7-3-8-2-9-1-10

So the previous example would become:
TABLE 1TABLE 2TABLE 3TABLE 4
Seat 1
Seat 2
Seat 317th18th19th20th
Seat 49th10th11th12th
Seat 51st2nd5th7th
Seat 63rd4th6th8th
Seat 713th14th15th16th
Seat 8...
Seat 9
Seat 10

Just a thought...  ;)

Corey Cooper

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Re: Seating Players and Balanced Tables
« Reply #3 on: August 06, 2015, 11:34:20 AM »
If you know you're going to have 40 players, then you can create four 10-seat tables.  Then turn on random seating at buy-in and the TD will do the rest.  The players will be completely randomly seated, and you shouldn't have to do anything after buy-in because the tables will be filled.  But there is no option currently to seat in any other fashion (across tables until they fill, far from the dealer, etc).

Asegzamfire

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Re: Seating Players and Balanced Tables
« Reply #4 on: September 23, 2015, 05:55:13 PM »
I would like to say that giving that kind of control to TD totally goes against the random seating. Seating a player as far as the dealer as possible like you suggest, mean if you get in the tournament early you will get the seat in the middle of the table, if you wait you might get the end of the table. By this players will be able to keep an eye on the tournament and enter when they want to have the postion on players they want in the tournament (at least have more luck to have the seat they want)

Random seating is part of the poker, everyone have to deal with the position they have at one time in their poker experience. No one has to have the advantage to be able to see everyone by having a better view because he is at the end of a table. I understand the brothers, wife, husband might be a problem. But being able to drag and drop a player in TD is there for that and accommodate the players when needed. But when you play a tournament with low amount of tables. It has to be expected to play on the same table as your friends.

Friendly customer is good... i mean great do to. But at some point the game as to stay the game and rules are there to avoid giving advantage to another player. By experience and thousand of customer every month i can tell you. Customer always have something to complain. They come late, but they want random seating when everything is full, they want to get in right now and they wants full stack. (depend if you blind out or not). You gotta give some fault to the player who is not showing up at the start of the tournament, which is not helping you opening the right amount of table. Seating friends at the same table is not the end of the world, as  long as you move them as soon as possible or try to change their seat before they play if you can. Player will understand. 2 tables and 4 friends... kind of hard to help there. But when you open the other 2 tables you move them. Its gonna help you start the other table and they also be happy, or they wont want to move because finally they have fun together.

In resume, my point is, don't give to much to the customer. Don't be too hard on them ether. They wont run away from the place, they will respect the place. The more right you give them the more problem you gonna have when time come to rule something.

P.S. Use the random seating, and make unavailable every odd seat on every table for example. as soon as you have 5 seat sold on every table, open every seat 5 for example. and fill up equally the table and go on and on like that. This will help in randomising your customer even if you have 3 friends in a row. This is the technique use pretty in every big Casino around the world.

Lafrog

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Re: Seating Players and Balanced Tables
« Reply #5 on: September 25, 2015, 02:25:57 PM »
Valid point