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Publishing instruction booklet

Hi,

I know it's a lot of work to prepare everything for the competition and it's hard to have IB published one week before the beginning of the competition for each round. I don't see big problem with IB being published on monday before the competition, for example.

BUT

I find important that the IB is published on the GP website first, so that every player can have the same amount of time to study it.
For a couple of days, IB of next sudoku GP round is published on the WPF member website. That's not cool for players who are not aware about all member's online activities.

Please WPF members: don't publish IB of GP round before it's published here !

Fred

Fred was quicker to react but I had the intention to post a similar message, so let's just say that I completely agree with this. Publishing the instruction booklet of a GP round on a WPF member's website, or any other website for that matter, before it has been made available on the GP site is certainly not a way to ensure fair competition. Please refrain from doing this in the future.

Bastien

Hello, let me give a few statements I find relevant to this topic.
1) It is written in the rules that an instruction booklet is published one week before a competition. It was 2 weeks in previous years, but just in the rules, it was nearly never fulfilled.
2) Nearly final version of all materials of Czech sudoku round was sent to me by Nikola Zivanovic on 7th February. (After few weeks of a busy coversation between two of us.) The very last missing piece of information was sent to Nikola on 15th February and on 19th February Nikola sent to us a complete set of pdf files. So it was ready in a final version 3 weeks before a competition.
3) I don't know when was a gp-page webmaster instructed to publish the booklet. On 5th March (5 days before the competition start) I dare to ask Nikola if there is a reason not-to-publish the instruction booklet? The message was forwarded to webmaster and the booklet was finally published. (I don't try to answer a question when it is published without asking.)
4) I admit that on Friday 3th March evening (which is less than a week before competition) I published the booklet with a czech translation on a homepage of czech sudoku and puzzle association (www.sudokualogika.cz). And I shared the link to this article in the corresponding facebook group.
It is our responsibility to attract attention of czech sudoku players to GP and this is the way how we do it - we translate booklets for them. Of course, usualy we are dependent on a time of publishing on gp-page. Waiting for the booklet is sometimes really frustrating to say it honestly.
5) I was warned by Jan Zvěřina that it may not be fair to be faster than official webpage. I answered that 1) I have time to do it now and I am not ready to wait to nobody-knows-when, 2) I don't think it makes any difference to know a few days earlier that Diagonal sudoku will be solved in GP again...
To conclude:
a) I am unhappy that instruction booklets are officially published late generally spoken and I am not responsible for the fact that "our" instruction booklet was published late.
b) I am pretty sure that nobody gained a significant advantage from my "act of violation". (You may disagree, of course.)
Jan Novotny

Dear Jan,
You cannot at the same time say that "Waiting for the booklet is sometimes really frustrating" and "I don't think it makes any difference to know a few days earlier that Diagonal sudoku will be solved in GP again..."

Either you find it is important that instructions booklet should be published on friday, then please accept the idea it could be important for other players, too, not just players from Czech Republic,
either you don't find it is important, then there is no reason to publish it on other website before.
I agree with you that probably nobody gained a significant advantage from that, but don't you think it could give a poor image of your federation to worldwide players?

Fred

We don't publish the booklet on our webpage to gain an unfair advantage in TOP 10 fights. Never.
We publish the booklet and its czech translation to help our players, to attract more amateurs to GP. That is why we are frustrated when the booklet is published late again and again.
If it is a crime, keep on throwing stones...

Dear Jan,

We had an internal discussion about this and we concluded that you didn't do anything wrong, since there aren't any official rules about publishing IB somewhere else before the GP site.

However, I would kindly ask the authors of the next rounds that such scenario does not occur again. For the next year we agreed that there needs to be an addition to the rules.

Nikola Zivanovic
Competition Director,
WPF Sudoku GP 2017

I see, there's already debate about it. :) Where is this weekend's competition IB avaliable? The link in the GP site is not working.

I've corrected it. It should work now.
Please check it.

Best,
Karel (Admin)

Works! Tnx!