Board Game Arena

Recently I just tried out some tournaments in BGA. In one of the tournaments one player got unresponsive from the start of the game and the rest of the players could do nothing. The tournament setting also disallowed kicking out-of-time players. I waited it out for a month, did absolutely nothing (except to fold out one trash hand pre-flop) and was then told to be eliminated.

Is there any way we could understand how the system selects players to be eliminated? It looks so random to me and doesn't seem to have anything to do with remaining chips, remaining thinking time, or ELO.

I actually further checked the tournament page and was surprised to see there were 15 tables out of 21 that were "closed automatically because no move had been made for a long period of time". It seems that a large elimination tournament doesn't work out that well - we've got too many players and it's hard to get one game done.

When a table is not finished at the round time limit in a multiplayer elimination tournament, the players with the least clock time remaining get eliminated. If a player is completely absent from the start, unfortunately people who by random chance happened to have had their turn before the absent player might be eliminated and there's nothing they could have done about it.

If multiple players have exactly the same clock time left, from not having taken a single turn yet, I'm not sure. Maybe the tiebreaker is BGA account number (= age) like it is when the game score ends in a perfect tie (including when someone gets kicked, in a tournament where "Players can kick out of time players" is enabled).

Thanks for the info. Makes sense to me then - I joined a couple tournament games and in both cases I got eliminated for doing nothing.

Also just wondering if it's a setting issue or if I missed it. When I play a real-time game there is always a screen asking all players to confirm. When it comes to a turn-based tournament game there is no such screen. IMHO a turn-based tournament game needs this screen more.

All turn-based games start automatically when the table is full. There is no confirmation screen.

I'm not sure what you say the confirmation screen should do for turn-based? It makes sense for real-time to check that all players are still online and paying attention to the screen/tab, but for turn-based this is not likely or necessary.