scoring variant

[kamatero13]

what variant about score is more fair ?

[Lotus Blossom]

Fair to whom? I don't think any are inherently unfair, just need a different strategy to play each one.

[kamatero13]

Fair to whom? I don't think any are inherently unfair, just need a different strategy to play each one.

i played yesterday with positive score and some players sayied is not fair because is good for the player with strong cards

[Lotus Blossom]

i played yesterday with positive score and some players sayied is not fair because is good for the player with strong cards

By definition, it's always good if you have strong cards?! Surely that comment holds true for all the game variants.

I don't know, seems a very strange comment to make, in fact sounds a bit like they were being sore losers. Nobody is forcing them to play if they really believe the game is unfair.

[kamatero13]

i played yesterday with positive score and some players sayied is not fair because is good for the player with strong cards

By definition, it's always good if you have strong cards?! Surely that comment holds true for all the game variants.

I don't know, seems a very strange comment to make, in fact sounds a bit like they were being sore losers. Nobody is forcing them to play if they really believe the game is unfair.

They said the more fair is negative score.

[Paddles]

Like Lotus Blossom said, I don't think any of the current systems are inherently more or less fair than the others.

However one suggestion I'd make is that I'd consider fairer is to change the scoring for bidding and winning 0: instead of 10 points, I think this should be scored as 5 points + the number of tricks in the round (e.g. 6 points when you're dealt 1 card, 12 points when you're dealt 6 cards). The reasons being:

1. Most of the time, it's a lot easier to achieve 0 (avoid winning all tricks) than to go for a positive number of tricks.
2. It's a lot easier to score 0 when you've only got 1 card, than when you've got 8 cards.

I can't claim credit for this idea, I remember reading it in a book a long time ago (I think it was Sharp, Richard, The Best Games People Play).

[boarshead]

I like the scoring variant I learned in my family:

10 points for getting your bid, plus 5 points per trick captured.
-5 point points per trick difference from your bid.

Thus someone who bid 1 and succeeded would get 15, while someone who bid 5 and succeeded gets 35. Meanwhile someone who bids 5 and only takes 1 trick would get -20.

The advantage to this system is that it causes players to bid as high as they can rather than staying safe at zero, but at the same time, it puts a lot of pressure to stay as close as possible to your bid (including not going over at all).

Would love to see this implemented here at BGA.

[RicardoRix]

If you think that bidding 0 rather than high is easier, then you should think that the positive option works best for rewarding those that are choosing the less favourable option.

My only problem with this option is that it may encourage strange high bids with the reasoning - if I throw other people of their true bids and try and steal some points by winning as many tricks as possible. While this rarely works to good effect it can spoil the game for the others.

A really nice variant that I used to play at home comes from dealing 12 cards and choosing 3 face down to represent the number of tricks you want to win out of the 9 remaining cards you have in hand. 0 for diamonds, 1 for spades, 2 for hearts, 3 for clubs. So you could select 1 diamond, 1 spade and 1 heart to suggest you thought you'd win 3 tricks. The same bonus of 10 applies.

[Natureboy]

Like Lotus Blossom said, I don't think any of the current systems are inherently more or less fair than the others.

However one suggestion I'd make is that I'd consider fairer is to change the scoring for bidding and winning 0: instead of 10 points, I think this should be scored as 5 points + the number of tricks in the round (e.g. 6 points when you're dealt 1 card, 12 points when you're dealt 6 cards). The reasons being:

1. Most of the time, it's a lot easier to achieve 0 (avoid winning all tricks) than to go for a positive number of tricks.
2. It's a lot easier to score 0 when you've only got 1 card, than when you've got 8 cards.

I can't claim credit for this idea, I remember reading it in a book a long time ago (I think it was Sharp, Richard, The Best Games People Play).

This does seem like a much better scoring system. Nothing worse than being the dealer with one or two cards and being forced to make a bad bid, but being the dealer for 5 or 6 card hand is not so bad. Scoring should reflect this factor.

Furthermore, it would be great to see an option for everyone to bid at the same time. We use this a lot where everyone sticks up the number of fingers for the number of tricks they want to win. Makes for a more interesting game as often two or three tricks away from number of cards. Also the dealer is less likely to be forced not to make a certain bid, only if tricks nominated equal number of cards must the dealer change their original bid. Should be easy enough to implement here, no-one can see how many the others have bid until all bids are locked in.

[JBD83]

So far I have always used a scoring pattern which would only represent how close we are from our trick prediction (irrespective of the actual number of tricks gained). Something like that:
- Predict 0, gained 0 => 1 point
- Predict 0, gained 2 => -2 points
- Predict 3, gained 3 => 1+3=4 points
- Predict 3 gained 2 => -1 point
- Predict 3 gained 4 => -1 point
- Predict 3, gained 5 => -2 points
...
Which means I have always played with the ultimate and only goal of trying to match my prediction