Pairs Event Support

[ctm]

Add the ability to hand-off control of a seat to another account.

eBARGE 2020 had a CHORSE event where each team had their own account. FARGO normally has a pairs event. We can do it the way we did CHORSE, but if there's time, it might be nicer to make it so that each member of a pair simply used their own account. Then there would need to be a way to hand-off control (either with a UI element or have it automatically switch with the game) from one member to another.

If we go this route, one question would be whether the partner should be able to see the hole cards of the other. I don't have a feel for if that was permitted, encouraged, rare, or common. If it was prohibited, then we should probably prohibit it here. If it was encouraged and common then we should probably allow it here.

[ctm]

Added info from the Queen of FARGO:

The Pairs event is a FARGO original. When we were at Foxwoods (for the first 20 years or so), the Tournament Director loved the idea so much that he made a Pairs event as part of the Spring and Fall poker series because it is unusual and fun. The partners do not get to look at the cards unless they are playing. If people have a partner, that’s great. If not, I match people according to whether they prefer to play Hold’em or Omaha8 (or either). I’ve done a pretty good job over the years – several of my pairings have cashed and have come back year after year as partners. The actual working of the tournament is pretty simple – one stack of chips and the players swap every 20 minutes. The TD would stop the clock at the end of the 20 minutes and any hands still in play are finished. Then all of the partners swap, the clock is restarted and the game is changed. This was originally designed to be a social event (similar to CHORSE) so that the partner would hang around the tourney area and chat it up with other players. The only downside is that you only chat with the people that are playing the same game you are. Oh – if a partner is late coming back to the game, they get blinded off – just like any other tournament.

[ctm]

I have much of this done, although I'm a bit short on time in that I need to go to sleep in about eight hours or so and then I'll be gone a few days.

AFAIK, the only thing I have left to do on this is make sure that all accesses to the private table_and_seat field of a RunningTournament take into consideration that each might have an alt player associated with it.

I think the way to proceed is to have a bool that says whether we're using alts and then assume that if we have one pair, then everyone is paired. That will work for the pairs tournament. I can generalize this later, if necessary.

[ctm]

I took care of the above issues. There's one little nit in that the winner that is announced might be the alt player rather than the player. There's a simple fix for that but I'm going to bed now.

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I fixed the problem I mentioned in my previous comment. I'm going to bed now.

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Ugh. I just realized that when players are moved, that may leave the wrong person playing the new game. That's easily fixed, but I have no time to do it before the race (which starts in under four hours). I only have to fix the moves and the final table combines, and I think they're both trivial.

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Although I addressed the issue from my previous comment, table breakdown (and perhaps player movement) is failing in a big way. I need to find and fix that and then do another test.

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Ugh! When I did my initial development and testing, I was using a mix that switches based on number of hands, but the true structure switches based on rounds. Doing it based on rounds is actually easier (I think), but now I should probably make it work for either... There's another bug beyond that, but that's "the big one", I hope.

[ctm]

Two big bugs remain:

I switched the bets and blinds in the structure. That's trivially fixed.

Vacation carries over acrosss player switches.

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Need to make sure everyone (partner and not) hears the bell on the game change.

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Additionally, it looks like the wrong game may be displayed as a notification when the games have switched and the player becomes an observer. I need to look into that more.

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I've fixed the bets and blinds, vacations and the bell. I wasn't able to quickly reproduce the wrong game display.

I'm deploying now.