Yesterday I opened a discussion of dice rolling in backgammon with a post about the dice themselves. Today I’ll move on to discuss some aspects of the way they are thrown.
Rolling the Bones, Part I
As discussed elsewhere, backgammon players have varied reactions to the enormous role that chance plays in the game. Among the interesting implications of this are the elaborate, and sometimes contentious, practices that surround the rolling of the dice. In serious backgammon, rolling the dice is not just a convenient way to inject a chance element into the game – it has grown into a kind of kabuki theater.
This post begins a short series on dice rolling in backgammon with a consideration of the dice themselves. Continue reading “Rolling the Bones, Part I”
Wimbledon
The Championships (better known as “Wimbledon”), one of the world’s premier bracketed tournaments, is due to start in a few days.
I’ll forgo a full FEPS analysis of Wimbledon’s bracket format. Presumably the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club has thought things through very carefully, and settled upon a format that meets its needs. At a guess, I imagine that the two main factors were fairness (A), honoring the traditions of the event, and spectacle, maximizing the economic value of the event, not necessarily in that order.
One of the distinctive things about the Wimbledon bracket is its use of partial seeding. Only the top 32 players in the 128-player main draw are seeded, with the other 96 being allocated their initial bracket positions by blind draw. This means that even the top-seeded player could draw the 33rd-best player in the draw in the first round, and that the lowliest qualifier could draw another lowly qualifier in the first round. And the 32 players fortunate enough to be seeded are still slotted into the bracket in a somewhat random way.
Seeding of any kind tends to improve the fairness (C) coefficient of a tourney. This post reports the results of some simulations that show how big this effect is, and compares it to other possible ways of seeding (or failing to seed).
Picking the Team
The International Cricket Council is running trials to select the U.S.A. women’s cricket team in Indianapolis this weekend. I went up to watch some of the action, and to reconnect with another cricket fancier.
Twenty-four women are competing for 14 spots on the national team. It’s an odd sort of event, and not really a tournament. It’s a weekend of T20 cricket matches that are entirely unimportant in themselves, but are part of an earnest competition with significant stakes. In this post, I’ll use test the FEPS framework to see if it can lend any insight into the event, particularly the central role of fairness.
Dropping Seeds
I’ve exchanged a few emails with a reader who runs a small softball tourney. With his permission, I’ll work through the issues surrounding his particular tourney, showing where I see design issues, and suggesting a format.
First, however, I’d like to spend a post on a more abstract question he posed in his first email to me. The question is whether the drop patterns I suggest, and have tested primarily in blind draw tourneys, should be reconsidered when used in a seeded tourney.
Still More Better Bad Byes
Some months ago, there were a series of posts (here, here, and here) about the allocation of byes – whether it was better to spread them evenly though the field, or to group them together so that they could begin play immediately by starting the second round with the byes playing each other.
One of the arguments made in favor of grouping the byes together is that it improved the flow of the tourney. Players would have to spend less time waiting for their opponents to become available, and the tourney as a whole would play our more quickly. Another observation was that the grouped-byes example I chose was intended specifically for a consolation backgammon tournament, and that my simulation was not for a full double elimination rather than a consolation, and that I used a luck parameter unsuitable for backgammon.
Armed with the new simulator, I can revisit the issue, addressing in particular tournament flow.
Simulating Flow
One of the features that I’ve added to the new version of the simulator is the ability to simulate the flow of a tournament in which rounds overlap. This post will introduce this feature, and in the next I’ll report what I think is an important simulation result that using the feature made possible.
Oh! Calcutta!
I’ve just returned from a backgammon tournament in Chicago. The format was a modified Swiss system. I will write more about Swiss tournaments soon – there is much to recommend them.
I did well in Chicago. I tied for second place in the open devision of the main event, and came within a single game of the overall championship. So, despite the fact that I, of all people, know how very much luck there is in backgammon, I’m tempted to think of myself pretty highly as a backgammoner just now. And, while it’s undoubtedly true that I wouldn’t have done so well without some measure of skill, I have to keep in mind that however good (or otherwise) I am, I haven’t gotten materially better since the last tourney I played in Minnesota, where I failed to win a single match.
In All That Luck, I offered some thoughts about how backgammon players deal with the fact that their game is so heavily dependent on chance. But there were on display in Chicago some additional ways that backgammon players have devised to recognize skill when actual match results are so capricious. One of these is the Calcutta auction.
Going with the Flow
One of the practical considerations for a tournament director in choosing a format is how well the tournament flows. But flow is a complicated concept – ideal flow, and the steps needed to attain it, will vary from one sort of event to another.
Sometimes you want to keep the competition moving, minimizing the time that the competitors have to spend waiting around for an opponent, a playing field, a referee, or some other needful resource to become available.
Other times you want to keep the competition from moving too fast. Particularly where the competition is physically exhausting, you want to allow sufficient time for players to recover from one match before asking them to play another.
Poor flow can compromise any of the four goals in the FEPS framework.
Recharges and B1G Baseball
The most common use of a recharge round is to allow the undefeated winner of the upper bracket a second chance if it loses the initial bracket unification match. But a recharge round can be used in other ways also.
The 2017 Big 10 baseball championship being held in Bloomington over the next five days has a bracket unlike any other I’d encountered. In it, there are two possible recharge matches, neither of which eliminates the possibility that a team will can fail to win the overall championship even when it has only one loss.
This bracket, B1G baseball 2017, has a number of interesting features, which can be appreciated by comparing it to a standard 8 bracket (A.B.|.C.X): B1GbaseballAlt.
tourneygeek.com 