What do you do if more than one person in a round doesn’t want to play a consolation game? I think there are some State Championships that run 4 rounds for every player no matter what (not sure how it works with 24 players) but I am glad that in PA we don’t do it that way.
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We have not had anyone not play in consolation because they know each placement counts in circuit points . But if they did not play then would get last placement in that consolation round
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I’d add that having tiebreaker games has another advantage: it keeps the last game of any round meaningful for more people, since more of them have hope of advancing than if there’s some rule to choose who moves on. It’s much more interesting - for everyone involved - when you still have a chance to catch up to someone to get into a tiebreaker game to advance. Your play means more, and theirs, too, since they can’t just sit on their lead knowing they’d win the rule-based tiebreaker.
As a side note, I would have been in a tiebreaker if only “points” counted, and I believe I would even have still gotten into the playoffs if the coin flip to decide which #1 result of one of the players would be counted had gone the other way. Such is pinball, I may not like the result, but the rules were posted and I accepted my fate. I played well my last game that round, too - even entered my initials - but was not high in my group and came up a point short of getting in cleanly, thus falling into the tiebreaker rule zone.
I disagree with some (not all) of the “if you don’t like it, don’t come” comments given the SCS situations people can find themselves in. To make SCS, you need to attend enough events, which may force you to go to some you’d prefer were run differently. Players are within their rights to say they would prefer things be run other ways so long as they provide constructive feedback to that end and realize that running an event is a tough job.
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Just had a 9 way tie before the finals of pincinnati matchplay and it was done as a one ball on a dmd game. Took 10 mins. We just did it while all the other players took their break and we set up the finals brackets. Easy peasy.
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I still think one of the most exciting hours at Pinburgh was the year there was a 9- or 10-way tiebreaker for the last 2 spots in A. I understand the time issue, but tiebreakers are really the zeroth round of the playoffs, and they decide the difference between “no money” and “guaranteed money, plus you still have a chance at the Big Bucks and trophy.”
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Agreed. Just do one ball games if it’s lots of people and do a full game on a fast player if it’s tied to advance in the finals or win it all.
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This method went extremely smooth in execution from what I saw of it! I wonder if anyone in the 17-24/9-16 in particular can throw in their input, since those were more complicated.
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This confuses me - if you’re using 1st and 2nd place finishes as a tiebreaker, isn’t this directly using “earlier round performance?”
FWIW, I have always hated this idea that one person’s X points is worth more than another person’s X points. If I earn the same amount of points as you, we did exactly the same and it feels really cheap to get knocked out because of some math.
Earlier round performance in this instance was when your 2nds, 3rds and 4ths happened. So they looked at total points in round 5, then 4 then 3, etc to see when the two players weren’t tied. At that point, whomever had the higher amount of points at that time won.
Hope that helps clarify a bit.
Preference for firsts/seconds means you don’t care about a person’s 4th place scores. A person with less firsts and the same score as another player is probably a more consistent player. I never understood this metric.
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Then award 7.001 for first. 5.00001 for second. 3.0000001 for third and 1 for forth. No arbitrary tiebreak rules, just let the points stand.
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Would it be legal to break ties by awarding them to the person(s) with the lowest IFPA ranking?
If it is clearly explained in the rules how ties will be addressed, I would think it would be legal.
Is it fair is another question altogether.
Yeah you can do whatever you want. Just might have some super angry players on your hands that don’t come back if it’s unpopular.
I use the automatic tie formula within matchplay to decide ties and it works super well and from a true maths and statistical point of view it is completely fair.
Yes I have sympathy if such a rule is not made clear at the start; so I make it clear that’s what I’m using and point folks at the matchplay documentation if they have questions.
In addition to using Swiss tiered means you are playing folks who are performing similarly to how you are performing and thus if you beat those people why play them again in a tie?! - you have beat them already. Using a single game as a decider rather than the previous X rounds of how they have performed seems more unfair to me. Note though even with a mathematical formula ties are still possible if not as probable.
If you want to avoid the computer picking the other person then play better!
Not having to run ties means I can have more folks qualify in the final and run a more interesting final format.
Neil.
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I don’t mind either way, and there are plenty of examples throughout all of sports and competition. Of the major teams sports, only baseball will do one game tiebreaks. NFL, NBA, NHL all go with a series of mathematical calculations based on a subset of a season’s statistics to break ties. I’m not a fan of the Pinburgh style so much because I think it should take all rounds into account, but really, as long as it’s defined up front I’m cool.
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That one is a hard one to swallow as I believe I did. It wasn’t swiss so we didn’t play most of the same people nor the same caliber of players. We only faced 5 of the same players of which I beat all 5 of those players, the other person only beat 4. I had a stronger strength of players as well. We both wound up with the same number of points, both had a single second and a single 3rd. We both achieved 14.5 points and I believe this tie breaker position wound up 16th or 17th seed out of 24 so we both “played better” than several people that made it in based off other rounds.
Is what it is at this point. I’d just rather see a playoff game than a who started with the most points format chose the winner of an entry position into finals.
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Chiming in with me POV… I would 100% approve of ties being broken and ranks being assigned based on actual play.
Seeing folks with exactly the same number of points at an event being ranked differently, or folks being ranked by how they seeded into a semifinals instead of how they played in them have personally effected me both positively and negatively and I didn’t feel good about it in either scenario.
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There is a simple way to do two-way tiebreakers in 4-person groups without having an additional game: head to head record. Whenever it’s a 3-game round, that will always work, e.g. 4-1-1 vs 2-2-2, the 2-2-2 wins since they finished higher two games out of three. Ditto 3-2-1-0 scoring with 2-1-1 vs 1-3-0, the 2-1-1 wins. Granted this doesn’t address the question of how many other players you beat, but then none of these systems take into account what the victory margins were. Last place may have 80% of what first did, or 2nd place may have 20% of what first did, but neither “wins” scoring system takes that into account. Thus, how many players did you beat may not be any better representation of how well you played relative to the other person you’re tied with.
As for the Houston situation, I would argue that any unbalanced system like this or Pinburgh where both who you play and what you play vary widely should have a full-game tiebreaker. Too many things are unequal to use points to decide, even if you use points from other rounds, positions, etc. You can even make a case that many players with one point fewer than enough to qualify actually played better than some who did. I wouldn’t go down that road, but it does support having a more rigorous tiebreak when the points are even.