The judges have made their decision. Miss DE32hCD will wear the crown. First runner-up is Miss 32TE, and Miss FOTA 32 Congeniality is Miss SE55779. Congratulations to all of our winners!
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Buster Brackets with you again for a quick wrap-up of the action in the recently completed Miss FOTA 32 contest. Also here is our expert analyst, Worm Tourney. Whew, that was quite some competition, Worm! What stood out for you?
Well, Buster, I didn’t expect it to be so close. The three kinds of brackets went in with very different fairness (C) numbers: the SE was way up at 97; the DE started off at 79; and the TE at about 72.
That is a big difference, Worm, but I think it tracks what most folks were expecting. Double elimination just has to be a good bit better than a simple knock-out, but there’s a diminishing return when you start to think about a third bracket.
That was my guess, too, Buster. But the thing that really surprised me is that all three designs converged on a fairness figure of about 50 once they’d all been pumped up to occupy the whole of the time allowed. It looks like the extra fairness is more a matter of simply playing more games than it is any special magic of the format.
That was an eye opener. The three were so close to each other that I thought at one point the judges were going to overlook the small f(C) differences, and give the crown to one of others. Miss DE32hCD was just so goll-durned ugly.
She was pretty funny-looking, Buster, but it wasn’t really her fault. The 500 minute limit hit her at just the wrong place, forcing her to keep just one round in single games. In the end, the decision to go with Miss DE32hCD was a fairness (A) ruling by the committee. After all, the pageant was called the fairest of them all pageant, not the reasonably fair and not so ugly that you’d never be seen with it pageant.
How did the tight fairness (B) rule play out? I noticed that there was no seeding in any of the candidates. Were there other effects?
None of the candidates could have met the fairness (B) standard if they’d had to use just 100,000 for their qualifying run, but 200,000 was usually enough, and if 200,000 wouldn’t do it, half a million did. There were some very minor line effects in shifted brackets, but nothing big enough to worry. Incidentally, there was one effort, by the SE folks, to use some seeding. Their idea was to create two seeding tiers, with 9-24 in one tier and both 1-8 and 25-32 in the other. Every A round match would have one of each. That way, no two teams from the top 8 could face each other in the first round.
It was a real Dolly–they even called it “stealth seeding”, because they thought it would escape detection. And it’s true that the average skill levels were uniform on all lines, but the expectations weren’t. There may be some payout scheme that would reward such trickery, but 65/35 wasn’t it. Everyone knew it was a Dolly, and nearly everyone was glad they didn’t get away with it.
How about recharges, Wormy? I’m surprised that we didn’t see any in the nominees.
We might have had one in a high-skill event, Buster, but at luck = 3 they simply take too much precious time, and they hurt more than they help on f(C). And no one wanted to figure out how to do all the recharges that might happen in a triple elimination.
Do any of the brackets look like up and comers for the future, Worm?
Miss 32TE is the one to watch, Buster. Triple eliminations are rare as hen’s teeth, and they’ve usually been run on painfully jumbled brackets when they are run. But this Miss 32TE is one lovely piece of work. I thing she needs some testing, but I could see a day when she becomes the first TE to be posted to the printable brackets page.
But Miss SE55779 was pretty impressive, too, didn’t you think?
You bet, Buster. In fact, that’s probably the most useful result as a practical matter. If you can get nearly as fair result from a single elimination, maybe more directors should be thinking about adding games, but not brackets.
Well, it’s been a pleasure to work with you, Wormy! I hope you’ll be back to help cover the next bracket pageant that comes along.
I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Buster.
That’s it from the Geek Dome in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. This is Brackets and Tourney, thanking you for your company, and signing off until next time.
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