Now that we’ve spent some time outlining the virtues we seek in our tournament designs, we can begin to get geeky. In this post, I’ll introduce a simple way of testing various tournament designs by running simulations to produce an estimate of the tournament’s fairness.
Fairness is not, of course, a simple concept, and some aspects of it are more measurable than others. Continue reading “Measuring Fairness”
As I see it, the goals we have to keep in mind when designing tournaments call into four main categories: fairness, efficiency, participation, and spectator appeal. One of the keys to designing tournaments is to keep in mind how these different values interact, and in knowing which values are paramount in any particular context.
(This framework is used in other posts, where I refer to it as the “FEPS” framework, where “spectator appeal” is condensed to “spectacle” so that it doesn’t have to become “FEPSA”.) Continue reading “The Four Goals in Tournament Design”
“That’s not fair!”
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that at a tournament (including many times that I said it myself), I’d buy something rather nice. When someone sees something happening at a tournament that they don’t like, there’s a good chance that the complaint, whatever its origin and merit, will be couched in terms of fairness.
Fairness is, indeed, crucially important. If your participants see the tournament as unfair, it’s likely in for trouble, not matter what its other virtues. So it’s worth spending some thought, early on, to unpack the notion of fairness. Continue reading “Fairness”
There is a wealth of information available about how to run various kinds of tournaments-chess tournaments, tennis leagues, darts tournaments, and so forth. But there seems to be precious little available that discusses tournaments in general.
Some of what you’ll find here is intended to be practical – showing how to select the right kind of tournament, and providing sample brackets and such. This practical advice will be supported by some research into how various kinds of tournaments can be expected to operate, particularly by running millions of tournament simulations, and tallying the results.
But I also discuss some more philosophical points. What does it mean to say that a tournament is fair? Why do we play games in the first place? What is a game, anyway?
