The Truth is My Master, Not Money

The Truth is My Master, Not Money

Oct 31, 2021

I know this site is all about getting people to send you money. If that happens, great. But, my main concern is for people to get my message. I am a thinker. I'd like to think that I am up there with the best of them. I have thought a great deal about the gaming experience. And, I have developed a number of exciting things to provide a most excellent gaming experience with board games and cards.

The first and foremost is that my games are fair. The Game Crafter is a nice website I use to make my board and card games: thegamecrafter.com (search Tony Berard in their search box). I have a bunch of games on there with the most recent being Dice Power Transfer Backgammon, which is a fair game.

Since truth is my master as the title suggests, I have to report that nearly every game in existence is unfair! Chess, Backgammon, Shogi, Go, and many others are all unfair. This is because of the opening move by the first player, and the second player "catches up." This continues on in most of these games until some sort of equilibrium is reached. This is if the second player has the skill to do this. Sometimes, the first player maintains an advantage for so long that the best the second player can hope to do is to draw the game.

Go has something where the second player gets some sort of bonus to help balance the game, which is a direct admission of the unfairness it has. In chess tournament playoffs, the practice is to give the first player (White) more time, but if the second player (Black) can draw the game, then they count it as a win for the second player. Most people hope for the Black pieces because chess has a huge draw statistic. White wins maybe 30 percent of the time in chess while Black wins about 15 percent of the time with the emaining 55 percent draws. So, in chess tournament playoffs, Black gets this 70% chance (15 +55) to win. This is why they mind mind the small time disadvantage; that boost in chances of winning is great from their perspective.

The rating system used in the chess world has improved things to be sure. But, this rating system, called the Elo rating system (named after Arpad Elo who developed it) has some flaws. One such flaw is the slow rate of speed in rapidly developing players. One player this has affected is Sam Sevian. I measured him in the 2500's when he was in the 2300's as a 12 year old boy. Nineteen months later, the Elo rating system finally caught up to his ability when he "officially" became a grandmaster. Just now, I processed the US Championship with Sam Sevian in it as a 20 year old man. I measured him at 2722, which is about 65 points above his rating at this tournament. Hopefully, the Elo rating system doesn't take another 19 months to catch up to him again.

You see, being in the 2700 club is a big deal in the chess world. Sam Sevian would get invitations to the elite tournaments where the big money is. A slow rating system like Elo's rating system means delays to the big paydays that elite tournaments can offer. Another flaw in the Elo rating system is when an elite player wins a match or tournament and loses rating points. That sounds crazy, but it's true. It happened back in 1972 when Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky to win the chess championship of the world, and he lost rating points for soundly defeating the champ like that. It's happened quite a few times since then. It happened to two players in the 2021 US Chess Championship: Fabiano Caruana and Wesley So both lost rating points. Sevian, Caruana, and So were all tied at the end, so they had a three way playoff that Wesley So won to become the US champion. Wesley said Caruana was playing well enough to win it, and he was so glad it went into a playoff. My rating system said that Caruana won it also, so there would have been no need of a playoff if the chess world used my rating system. I have a book about my rating system on Amazon: amazon.com/author/tonyberard

I also have developed a new tournament design called the Block Transition Tournament. This new design places the players in blocks of certain sizes. Round robin tournaments are run in each of the blocks, and the players are reranked and reseeded into a new set of blocks. Blocks can be of any size but smaller blocks like size 2 through about size 6 work best. I think a popular selection for a BTT (Block Transition Tournament) will be for a 14 player tournament with three 4-blocks and one 2-block. The players in a 2-block play each other three times while the 4-blocks are running their round robins. The final seeding of the blocks has a different type of distribution than the previous spread out evenly distribution. The last reseeding is called The Power Concentration Method. The top two performers go into the 2-block, and they were kept from facing each other until now. So, at the end of the tournament, the top two players get three cracks at each other for all the marbles. The end of a tournament should be the most exciting point, and now it can be if an organization like FIDE or the Mind Games (or Scrabble or Backgammon etc) adopt my new tournament design.

I am a mathematician, and I wrote a college level textbook showcasing my contributions to mathematics. This class does not exist in colleges and universities (yet). This book is also on Amazon (you can see it on my Amazon author page shown above). It took me about 10 years to write that book: Points, Lines, and Conic Sections. You can help me enrich the college curriculum by getting this course adopted by colleges and universities the world over.

So, it should be clear from this very brief statement of my life's work that I have been seeking the truth for a long time. I have received probably less than $200 for my life's work in total. Since I have been at this for over 30 years, that's less than $10 per year. I haven't sold a book on Amazon in over 4 months, for example. I have only sold two decks of my Colors RSP Deck of Cards on The Game Crafter after even being on there for several years. I have been writing on Medium.com now for about 6 months, and the October payout when it comes will be the first time I break a dollar (it's at $1.47). I have almost 50 articles on there with less than $5 total to show for it. One month I made 6 cents.

I will keep plugging away at this even if I don't get any supporters on here because I know I am searching for and finding the truth. Since the truth is my master, I will keep on keeping on. If I had some money, I could begin to promote my work, and I could finish my book on The Block Transition Tournament. It would be nice to publish it on Amazon--actually, it would be nice to publish it with a real publisher so that it makes it to book shelves. It would be nice to be able to get my math book out there in colleges and universities. Having money would bring me more options.

In closing I will say that any one of my ideas mentioned in this brief article should have brought me millions. Yet, our "information age" is not really that. You only get to have "reach" on the internet if you pay to play. The quality of my work is superb. Why doesn't any of it sell? It's because there is zero marketing. You can have the best widget out there, but if no one sees it, you get zero sales. It reminds me of the old saw: if an inventor invents an awesome board game but no one on the internet sees it in his online store, did it ever exist in the first place?

Anyway, if you read this please consider buying me a coffee. I do think my stuff will enhance the world. Help me make the world aware of it. Thanks.

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