Tomorrow is the last day that we will take bets for the ChessBookie game for this leg. There will be no bets on Shulman's move (due to the timing) therefore when we compute the leaderboard after the Amber games tomorrow, the final result will determine the 1st ChessBookie World Champion!

We are computing the leaderboard statistics right now so that everybody can see where they stand and make intelligent bets for tomorrow's games accordingly. Currently in the lead is User: Andoy with 22,699 chessbucks.

Coming up from behind in the final round, with a bold 10,000 chessbuck bet on Kramnik's last round draw, finishing with 27,833 chessbucks is none other than longtime chessgames contributor.....

♔ User: iron maiden ♔

<<<<< The 1st ChessBookie Champion of the World ! >>>>>

As the winner of this prestigious title Iron Maiden will receive:

• TWO YEARS of premium membership to Chessgames.com

• His choice of ANY BOOK selected from the fine publisher and vendor of rare and interesting books, Hardinge Simpole http://www.hardingesimpole.co.uk/ (Iron Maiden: just pick the book you want, and email chess@chessgames.com with your choice. Don't forget to include your mailing address so we can have it shipped to you ASAP.)

♖ SILVER AND BRONZE MEDALS ♖

The 2nd and 3rd place finishers User: hairmajorchair (26,900 chessbucks) and User: Andoy (22,699 chessbucks) will both receive a one free year premium membership.

♘ QUALIFIERS ♘

All of the top-10 participants of the Championship Leg are automatically seeded into next year's Championship, as per the rules in the ChessBookie Game Help Page. This includes the top three players named above, plus: barbababa (22,071), kellmano (16,318), Bob72 (15,973), Fredrik (13,858), Shajmaty (13,633), ronaldducalang (13,107), and Rimrock (12,606).

♗ WHAT'S NEXT FOR CHESSBOOKIE? ♗

The Chessbookie will take a short vacation for the next few days and then the Spring Leg for the 2nd year will begin. During this brief intermission we'll use this forum to discuss ideas for possible improvements, rule changes, and other ideas for the upcoming year.

First, a general observation: the game reward people who make sensible bets but it also rewards luck. Perhaps its unrealistic to expect anything else from this game, it could just be the nature of the competition.

Here is a short list of potential changes.

<NEW BETTING CAPS>

The betting caps served a great function in discouraging cheating. During the first two legs we had people who signed up dozens of accounts to sway the odds of certain bets ridiculously in their favor. By capping new players to 200 chessbucks, it because very hard to do that.

However, the loose limits for the top players add a lot of luck to the endgame strategy. Maybe different caps could help addess these issues.

<PAY DAY>

This idea is designed to help out people who get bored of the game in the middle of a leg, because they lost all their money. The idea is that all accounts get a boost of chessbucks on some predesignated day, roughly halfway through the leg. Perhaps the boost could be an additional 1000 chessbucks.

Alternately, we could make payday a weekly event. Each Friday you get an extra 200 added to your account, sort of like "passing Go" in Monopoly. A drawback to this approach is that players who don't start at the bginning of a leg may be hopelessly handicapped.

<PRE-SEEDED BETTING POOLS>

The idea here is that the Chessgames bookie will put initial bets in place to automatically have starting odds for the wagers. That way the very first people to bet will see realistic odds for their bet, and they don't need to worry about being stranded without anybody taking up opposing positions. Some rule of thumb could be used, e.g. a typical game between two players might look something like this

• White - 1000 chessbucks
• Black - 750 chessbucks
• Draw - 1250 chesbucks

This is roughly proportional to the stats found on ChessGames.com Statistics Page for the outcome of white/black/draw, except slightly more biased towards draws since our GM games tend to be drawn more than the average game from our database.

Likewise, a Pick-Three could have money seeded, using some rules like this --

• No draws (8) - 2 chessbuck minimum bet
• One draw (12) - 20 chessbuck bet
• Two draws (6) - 200 chessbuck bet
• Draw-Draw-Draw (1) - 300 chessbuck bet

If my math is right that would mean the starting pool for a pick-three would be 1,706 chessbucks with odds ranging from roughly 850:1 (for the no-draw tickets) to 5:1 (for the all-draw ticket).

One benefit of pre-seeding the betting pools is that the game becomes playable regardless of the number of participants--even if only a handful of people were active, they could still try to make money by playing "against the house."

<PRIZES>

<PAY DAY> I like this idea too. 200 every week sounds better. The new players could get several weeks payment when they start.

<PRE-SEEDED BETTING POOLS> This I don't like. Earlier the house took 5% meaning that most of the players will lose money in the long run, unless they were betting clearly better than average. After pre-seeding there could arise some absurd situation. If the odds were close to correct ones, one could bet 200 to white wins, draw and black wins in every game and win money in the long run.

1 - Somebody makes a large 10,000 chessbuck bet on a conservative outcome, such as betting on a draw in a certain match-up that is strongly expected to be a draw.

2- Then suddenly, ten new people sign up to chessgames and right off the bat, they run to the ChessBookie game to get their initial 1000, and they all immediately run to the loanshark to get their max-loan of 500.

3 - These 10 new players all decide to make a 1500 bet on either White or Black in the very same game.

4 - Suddenly the draw is paying 3:1 odds or 4:1 odds, whereas 2:3 would be more realistic. As expected, the game is drawn, and now the player who made the initial bet suddenly has 25,000 chessbucks to toss around.

And wouldn't you know it, these 10 new people who just signed up happen to have the exact same IP address as the guy who made the initial 10,000 chessbuck bet!

So the 200 limit for new players serves a very definite purpose, by discouraging cheaters. It's still possible to cheat in the above described way, but the payoff is much less, since each new account can only wager 400 (200 on White; 200 on Black) instead of 1500.

Or better yet, how about setting the caps to be a function ONLY, or partly, of the frequency of activity (say, number of bets placed on different games - so as not to allow a new account that places 20 bets on different outcomes of a single 'pick three' - to be considered a "veteran player") rather than the resultant net worth?

The problem with the current setup is that it makes it very hard to climb out of a slump if you can only bet tiny amounts on everything, just because you've lost a few large bets previously. It really effectively puts you out of the running for the duration of the leg, and the betting caps have been IME a far worse limitation than the lack of funds, bless Sharkie's heart! ;)

This might also prevent problems with the new way of cheating that might arise if the Payday idea (which is a great one IMO) is introduced - as it is now, cheaters could simply create a bazillion new accounts at the start of the leg, and then just let them sit there for a while and get filthy rich from Paydays alone, until their betting caps will allow their "masters" to use them any way they wish. :\

The betting caps won't eliminate the duplicate-account cheaters, but it will minimize their ability to affect the odds. And I'm not sure I see a strong reason to tweak the caps to a different number than they are at present.

As someone else has pointed out, the payday idea may make a slight enhancement to the diminished ability of the duplicate-account cheaters to infect the game. Of course, the chessbookie serves a very similar role. I happen to think that the interest charged by the bookie adds a fun element to the game, and keeps it realistic.

On a related note, I sometimes play blackjack on another website for their equivalent of chessbucks. They have a "bonus spin" every so often that is not a part of real blackjack. As you would expect, over the long run, the only "bucks" you have in your account result from the "bonus spin" (the equivalent of a "pay day.") If you play real blackjack over the long run (without counting cards) after all, you are going to lose your money. I find something ultimately unsatisfying about sitting on a large pile of "bucks" that didn't result from what I went there to do -- play blackjack.