Advice needed re: Tournaments that limit player machine choice

Crazy thought: should pingolf tiebreakers use easier goals to prevent them from running long? Cut the goals in half and then it becomes almost like a series of one ball games.

I’m sure it’s a flawed idea.

I’d think easier goals would increases the odds of ties in the tiebreakers significantly. But I guess you’re saying it could be a bunch of shorter tiebreakers.

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That’s kind of interesting.

Not sure why anyone would just pick position, though. Going “deep strats” and trying to induce an opponent into using up valuable machine picks?

What about doubling the target thereby making it less likely to be achieved? Then the final score becomes more significant and hopefully there will be fewer ties.

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If you need randomness, I invite you to wheeldecide.com
I try to run inclusive tournaments, taking as many as possible into the playoffs. I found it to be a real headache tracking making sure that people weren’t picking the same game twice.

My solution? I created the Bluffs Wheel of Playoffs. Top seed picks position, the wheel picks the game. Set the wheel to remove a game once it’s played, and then when every game has been chosen once, the wheel resets.

I’ve had a few people really hate it, including one who drew all EMs and has never been back since, but generally it speeds things along, levels the playing field and ensures every game gets played as we progress through the playoffs.

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That’s a cool customizable app to run a browser! Not necessarily a fan of how you’re using it for playoffs, with such a wide disparity of game types, but that’s a cool way to visually show a random game selection for tiebreaks (if the rules call for a random game selection).

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Yeah, either get your opponent to burn a pick.

Or, you think they will pick something you like (thus saving you a pick).

Or…there are one or two luckboxes in the bank. You know your opponent isn’t going to choose them, but you don’t want to end up drawing it through random assignment.

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I didn’t mean to say that. Making a harder target makes for longer games. Do you really want another tiebreaker if your first a game where all players played 5 balls of GOT?

I had a pingolf event where the target scores were increased for the A division. Hardly any 1s, or 2s…some 3s, a lot of 4s, and a fair number of 5 full ball games. This is significantly longer. Longer than two, or three games with easier goals where less balls are played.

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I’m a big fan of the “tournament director picks a random game” approach to tiebreakers. @brewmanager ‘s wheel is a nifty take on that.

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Random game pull seems like the easiest solution to the problem, which is very simple to do in MP thankfully. Then we can let the seed pick order, which still gives some kind of advantage for playing better.

I am very hesitant to change the scoring used during tiebreakers to be different to the rest of the event. Obviously this introduces some confusion and an extra layer the TD has to explain, but I don’t think this much of a change is that needed. For the 3 years we have run the series the longest a tiebreaker has ever gone is 2 games and for the most part the other players not involved watch and find it exciting to see how it plays out. Longest I saw was in Vegas when Josh and Jason went 3 games, but it was super exciting to watch and the people there were really into it.

I prefer “Kevin Martin Random Game™” . . . Kevin stares at a bank of games, flips a coin 4 times, then declares that the game randomly selected is the shortest playing game in the bank :smile:

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I appreciate that you included the trademark. :grinning:

I’ve seen Doug do it by putting the name of a game in an envelope the night before. One game, one envelope. Tiebreaker one, open envelope 1. Tiebreaker two, envelope 2. It takes away any sense of “if Jon and CDS play Spider-Man we’ll be here all day so I’m picking something else.” On the other hand, it might backfire if you end up with Jon and CDS playing Spider-Man via randomization. :slight_smile:

I used to be a fan of this method, until I had to play a tiebreaker on “high hand” at Pinburgh.

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We changed the rules this year to put all tiebreakers on High Hand.

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