Hi! To my surprise, today i received email from admin of polish site online games - Kurnik (english: www.playok.com).

He asked if I'm further interested and if I could collect players. So it's two question for you - who is willing to play sometimes on this site? And who could promote possible hex back on the Kurnik?

Will they promise to not remove Hex again, say for the next 20 years?

I hope we can play there for the next 20 years :)

Hope? I was thinking of something more.

The email you got sounds like a lame apology to me (“We were an ass, sorry to have kicked you out. Will you come back, please?“)

I also got the message - I'm in.

I'll promote it amongst my friends who used to play there.

@ypercube it's probably because me and other people were constantly asking about bringing back the game to kurnik.pl and admin hopes the attendance will be bigger than it used to be.

Yper, let's start that we don't have a site to play hex online  (at least popular and playable). According to my information, hex has been removed due to small number of players and bad bahavior of some players.  Maybe they also decided that is doesn't pay them off? I don't think we should be offended but just gather together again

Lukasz S. I also wrote about bringing back few times. I think that we should try to mobilize and be happy that we have where to play in real time.

I'm in too :)

Great news! I'd like to play more real-time Hex and there's not many people on BGA. I'm in too.

Breaking news my friends ;) You can try:  https://www.kurnik.pl/hex (english: https://www.playok.com/en/hex). Game is available, you can try and send your feedback. Game isn't yet announced on the main page, but will be among less popular games like blogpoly, lines, mill, paper soccer

I'm absolutely in! Lazy, Arek and I have been trying to support “real-time” Hex matches on IGGC for the last few years. And i'll occasionally get on BGA as well (where i've actually gotten a few matches with Maciej interestingly enough). We've never been able to get those communities to the point where its possible to get matches with any regularity though. I've done some of the weekly tournaments on ludoteka, but it's very rare for other strong player's to show up, and it didn't feel right to beat up on casuals.

If we can get enough of a community on Kurnik to make regular training possible it would totally be worth the effort! That said, you guys should still come by IGGC every once in a while because the “rewind” function is good for analysis.

It's the admin's site. He gets to do what he wants, offer Hex or stop offering Hex. Last I checked, this service was free to the public. If he offers Hex for 20 years or for 2 months, I would be grateful. Will there be automated tournaments again?

By the way, there are automated tournaments on Ludoteka already.

The game is now back on the PlayOK main page. Hopefully the other several games that were removed will pop up one after the other also. This was great news for the Hex community. If you want to analyze Hex games just visit a desired player's profile and there click on the games button to find all the games in replay move-by-move. This is great not only for analysis but also for finding possible programs and fake accounts.

For me, on Playok, sometimes the swap button works, and sometimes it doesn't.

I just wrote about it to the website administrator

You have to activate swap option before starting a game.

Probably the issue is that you zooming the screen

Size 13x13 is available

There are official tournaments: saturday 19:15 (9 rounds, 2 minutes per game, swap, 11) and saturday 21:15 (9r, 3m, swap,11).  Time zone UTC +1:00

Great. Tournaments are good.

Great. We should ask for other boad size tournaments.. 2 min 11x11 seems scary :)

Arek, send e-mail to kurnik@kurnik about size 13.  I'll do the same

I'm so glad this exists, but I'm dismayed that 99% of games are created WITHOUT the swap rule. Isn't Hex super-imbalanced in black's favor without the swap rule? Especially on 11x11, which is again 99% of the games here. I suspect the black winrate on this server is 80+%.

It's change: on Saturday 21:15, 13x13, 7 minutes, 7 rounds.

Daniel, some more bugs to fix in Krunik:

The “Yes” button for “Undo”  is just below the “Resign” button…

There should be also smaller and larger boards, why not 2x2 or 27x27? Ask him… :)

Ok, I just informed kurnik webmaster. You can wrote to him on kurnik@kurnik.pl :)

Also the password recovery system is broken: you can't recover a password without an email address but you can't enter an email address without knowing your password.

I received the answer that this is the case in all games on Kurnik and there is no easy solution to improve it (about resign button)

what the fuck! it says i cant join the tournament because im a new user!? are you fucking kidding me!!!!!!!!!!!!!! what the hell do i have to do to not be a new user?!!!!!!!!!!

simpledeep, eheh, what's your nick there?

anyway, 2x2 was a joke, but i do really think 6x6 could be useful for newbies.

i also wanted to join but I didn't have a proper account… anyway timing is so fast, it's mostly a joke… you can't play 13x13 on 5m… at least I can't… :)

Also i see many newbies aren't aware of swap rule, it's just sad… most tables have no swap rule enabled…

Lazy, please note that not everyone has so much time to spend over two hours in one tournament.

Simpledeep, I create account on 03-12-2017 and I played today

If i had to guess, It's probably something like a minimum number of games played

and lazy, the short time is the perfect handicap, you master-level players will still win the vast majority of the time, but now the rest of us might have a better chance of getting lucky on rare occasions

i was really looking forward to a saturday afternoon hex tournament, hopefully i'll be eligible next week

What happened? I visited the site (kurnik aka playok) recently and the hex section looks abandoned.

No more than 3 or 4 players.

Where have all the Polish players gone?

I'm not polish but i went back to university this past march (online, so semesters start when it's convenient for me) and i felt like i had to avoid other game sites or i wouldn't get any schoolwork done.

I visited a few times last week and I did manage to have a few games with some reasonably good opponents. But I didn't see many people online.

Hi all hex players! What is going with you? Shame that almost nobody play on Kurnik. I hope it will change and I'll have someone to play with…

around 2/3 of the time  there is someone who can play, unfortunately, some frequent players refuse to play with swap rule.

I recently wanted to play real-time hex, but 3-4 times I looked at kurnik there were only about 2-3 people around, all of them newbies :/

I'll also come once in a while, persist people! :)

Force, just give handicap to newbies, and you'll get interesting games :P

In the past kurnik had an option of making tournaments. Maybe it's a good idea to organize one, that would probably encourage some players.