An issue that arises in tournaments where the prizes are funded chiefly by entry fees is whether to have a low entry fee and small prizes, or a large entry fee and larger prizes. The better players often want the bigger prizes, but the players who don’t expect to win anything (or who are just shorter of funds) would often prefer lower fees and smaller prizes. Continue reading “Side Pools”
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A Stealth Bracket?
A friend asked me about the brackets in use as a recent backgammon tournament held in California. The tournament is a popular one, but has to be played in two days. The organizers cap entry in the main event at 64 players, though more would like to play. Even with the cap on entries, however, the play ran late on Sunday night. It was a double-elimination format, with a progressive consolation. My friend suggested that the tourney would play more quickly, and accommodate more entries, if it were changed to a main – consolation – last chance format with slightly shorter rounds.
Those changes would make for a shorter tourney. He’d break even on the format changes – the round saved by not giving the middle-bracket winner a second chance at the main title would be offset by the extra round needed to accommodate the extra players. But the shorter rounds would speed things up. There are various other ways to make the event play more quickly also.
The brackets that were actually played have a number of curious features. Perhaps this tourney has an example of a stealth bracket – a bracket intended to conceal some of its features.
Quantum Backgammon
One of the ways to maintain interest in a competition that might otherwise be a somewhat monotonous series of individual games is to make some of those games more valuable than others. Backgammon does this in a really ingenious way.
The backgammon boom of the 1930s is often attributed to the invention of the doubling cube, a device that causes some games to be more valuable than others, but does so in a way that opens new avenues for skill.
Quantum Golf
One of the ways to keep games interesting for both players and spectators is to have quantum effects in the criteria for success.
A quantum effect is created when success or failure in a game is made to depend on a sharply delineated result according to a strict category criterion. The game of golf provides a useful example of this. No golf shot is definitively good except the ones that end with the ball in the hole rather than somewhere else.
The Summer of ’81
As promised, a notorious example of using the fresh start technique to add interest to a professional sports problem. In the Major League Baseball season of 1981, the need to maintain interest in the season with a fresh start tempted tournament organizers to compromise all three of the maxims of tournament design.
A strike by the players resulted in the cancellation of about a third of the 1981 season. In order to recoup some of the revenue lost during the strike, when play resumed it was announced that there would be an additional round to the post-season playoffs, pitting the winner of the first half of the season against the winner of the second half. This arrangement threatened to compromise all three of the maxims.
Hope Springs Eternal, at Least in Tennis
To win a match in a high-level professional tennis tournament, you need to win about 100 points (unless the match is in the men’s draw at one of the majors, in which case you’ll need about 150). So it should be possible to simplify the famously elaborate scoring system for tennis, and possible make the game more fair. Why fuss with love-15-30-40, with deuce and advantage, with games, tiebreakers, and sets? Why not just tally up the number of points won – first to 100 is the winner?
That’s a really bad idea, a recipe for truly boring tennis.
The scoring system for tennis is one of the best examples of two related techniques for keeping it interesting: the fresh start, and the quantum effect. I’ll write more about the quantum effect in a future post, but for now let’s focus on the fresh start.
Keeping It Interesting
Professional games and sports need to be organized so that the competition is interesting to watch. And one frequent way to do this is to keep the ultimate outcome of an individual contest in doubt for as long as possible. The techniques for doing this often compromise fairness and other values.
What is a Tournament?
In other posts, I’ve been at some pains to define some essential words, such as “game”, “sport”, and “fairness”. But if there’s one concept at the heart of tourneygeek, it is “tournament”. Defining that word proves a bit difficult.
Backgammon Content on Tourneygeek
I’m running for the Board of Directors of the United States Backgammon Federation, or USBGF. In connection with this, I’m hoping for a small influx of readers interested specifically in what this blog has to say about backgammon. This page provides a starting point.
Remaking the NBA Playoffs
National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver has floated the idea of changing the way that teams qualify and are seeded in the NBA playoffs. Instead of qualifying eight of the fifteen teams in each conference, and seeding those eight into separate knock-out bracket, with the winners of those two brackets playing in the finals for the championship, perhaps the league should qualify the 16 teams with the best record, regardless of conference, into a single 16 bracket.
The reason that alternatives are sought is that the two conferences of the NBA are widely regarded as being badly our of balance. According to the gnomes at fivethirtyeight.com, eight of the nine best teams in the league, including the top three, are in the Western conference.
One of the possible objections, anticipated by Mr. Silver himself, is that the regular season schedule is not balanced between the two conferences. In the 82-game season, each team plays each other team in the league at least twice, but each team plays ten of the teams in its own conference four times, and the other four in-conference teams thrice. Is this a problem?
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