Wicked idea for dealing with round 10: Round 10 1/2: All players who are either on the tiebreaker number OR are one point [or half a point] above it go into the tiebreaker. If it’s “clean” [no tiebreaker for 40th], then everyone a point below [or half a point below] gets brought into the tiebreaker. In essence, a mandatory tiebreaker for everyone at the edge after round 10.
Yes, I know, it adds time and hassle [if too much time, make the tiebreaker round 10] … but think how exciting it would be to watch. Look at all those people squirming for the last spots in a one game win or go home situation.
For those who say this would just push the collusion incentive spot up one point, remember that it’s just 3 points from the cut to bye-land. I think the desire to collude would be noticeably less for those still having a good chance at a bye.
I love the scoring app introduced at PAPA in April. I think messages could be pushed via that app to tourney participants which would help if communication is an issue. Unfortunately there’s a large number of international participants who cannot get their phones to get internet access at a reasonable cost in the USA ( i guess a GB of data can be up to $1000!! from what I heard).
Honestly I don’t really know if the OP’s issue is really even that big a deal IMHO. Whether I played KME in round 6 or the finals either way to win Pinburgh I am going to have to beat him and everyone else. There’s never going to be a perfect matching solution to player skill. As a first time Pinburgh player I was very happy with how the tourney was run, I thought the matches got harder as I was seeded with more appropriate players.
Thanks Bob. This (motivating players not to collude) is the primary reason byes were introduced into Pinburgh, after having seen the collusion in IFPA 5’s final qualifying round.
How about this:
Players ranked #1-#40 (currently in qualified positions) will play a tier of 40: 1-20-21-40, 2-19-22-39, …, 10-11-30-31. This separation should be enough to motivate the middle players to shoot for byes.
Players ranked #41-end (currently not in qualified positions) will play a tier of 4: 41-42-43-44, 45-46-47-48, etc. Because these players are not qualified they will not be motivated to collude, and we restore the earlier behavior of having players who don’t have a chance compete with nearby players instead of the wider tier.
We can make this identical argument about every single round at Pinburgh. So, this argument suggests there should be a wholesale change to the way seedings are assigned at Pinburgh. Thoughts?
I was less worried about the imbalance in early rounds that at the decisive 10th round, especially given the new imbalance of 1-32-33-64 vs. 65-96-97-128. There will always be players who qualify whose path was “easier” in terms of the positions of whom they played against, but as we both know, good players can have bad-for-them positions in any given round and vice versa, so that’s not a guarantee of “unfairness.” You can play lower-positioned players that still amount to a tougher match. The final round this year, however, given that “player quality sorting” had a full 9 rounds to take place, and given the likely huge gap between #1 and #128 in particular, was more unbalanced that I would suggest.
I would not make a major change to the earlier rounds as a result of this logic. I do like your idea of 1-40 playing within and 41+ playing in fours, although I might make the top 40 1-11-21-31 through 10-20-30-40 instead, just to give the higher folks a slightly harder match. The one catch to either of these ideas, though, is how to handle someone tied for 40th after round 9? The 40 person of 1-20-21-40 is in a different boat than 41 of 41-42-43-44, but as you clearly intended, a much closer boat than this year. I suggest using score in round 9 as the deciding factor [or round 9 then round 8 if needed], in which case merit chooses who gets which path, and I’d like this idea even more. Thanks for throwing it out there for feedback!
Which one should get #40 then? The one in the worst position at the rank? It sounds like this is a case where people are saying #40 is worse off than #41.
1-11-21-31 is interesting, it would create a better balance of difficulty among the groups, though surely #31 will be making next year’s thread
I like the idea it is super critical to get the 40/41 seeding correctly, I would like to see wins (3’s) become the first tiebreaker component, it stresses winning is important and rewards individuals to always try to play their best, then using round 9 or less if tiebreakers continue.
Hmm, strength of schedule could be considered a better tiebreaker than round 9 raw score, although that’s harder to determine. Requires further thought.
Shrinking the range was my first thought after reading the original post. Going all the way out to 64 seemed pretty harsh for the person in 64th place.
For what it’s worth, I realized this seeding and someone pointed it out. Having dropped because of one bad round earlier on Day 2, I really needed a strong last performance. One point to make finals from what I ended up with. Did playing near the highest seed players potentially hurt my chances of moving on? I’d like to think it did just because of statistics. At any rate, this ‘group collusion’ seems like something that wouldn’t likely happen, at least not likely enough to change the seeding only for the last round.
I had actually forgotten about this and while it won’t really ruin my experience, thinking that my chances were at least marginally if not much better playing seeds closer to me does grind me a bit. Play better, play better people for points, play worse, play less better people for points, the latter providing more opportunity to move up (and thus leave with money in my pocket and the great feeling of making finals).
I do not like the round 10 seeding and think it should follow the progression of seeding for the whole first ten rounds. Otherwise it seems as though statistically it would hamper ‘even’ playing groups, especially at the end of qualifying when most of the variance in ability would be much more worked out even than the beginning of day 2. Geez Adam, now you gave me something to stew over
1-bye matches: 5-10-11-16, 6-9-12-15, 7-8-13-14
play to get double bye or at least keep the one you have
0-bye-but-in matches: 17-28-29-40, 18-27-30-39, 19-26-31-38, etc.
The top person in each of these is highly motivated to play well since they’re on the cusp of a bye.
I had a similar idea in This post where you use those cut lines to try to build more exciting matches. Also thought about using points rather than seeding for placement in final matches, and ditch the concept of tiers, since I can’t think of a situation where it isn’t advantageous to be placed in a lower tier at any sizing, going into finals.
This. It’s clear I need to take a break, get some sleep, and come back later. And I should take feedback at face value only, regardless of the words and phrases that surround it.
Thank you @cayle for your thoughtful reply. The reaction is on me, and I will do better. I have deleted my inappropriate responses.
Everyone who would be in or currently tiebreaking gets tossed into a special round 10 draw. To create even groups of 4, 0 to 3 players below them would be drawn/meme’d in to this pool such that the total number is divisible by 4.
Just like Bowen proposed, run seeds 1, X+1, 2X+1, 3X+1 / 2, X+2, 2X+2, 3X+2 / etc.
(X = [# of players in pool]/4)
Everyone else (or for the next Y points away from the tiebreak) gets put into the classic “closest 4” groupings.
This prevents issues with lucking into/out of the top 40 round due to seeding and creates some interesting mechanics around the bye positions. If there’s 48 for example, some groups may incorporate players of all desires (5/17/29/41: “I want double bye”/“I want bye”/“I want security”/“Let me in”)
I had a response and I nixed the whole thing in favor of the thing I like best.
If you want to determine strength of schedule for that round, add up the CURRENT seeds of everyone in the player’s played-against history (and add dupes multiple times, obviously). Whoever has the lowest total has the higher strength of schedule. In theory.
I would prefer 1-4-5-8 and 2-3-6-7 here, for those players to fight for the double bye. So then it would be a tier of 8, a tier of 32, and a tier of everybody else.
It seems like the goal of seedings for people around each cut of bye/playoffs should be to have 2 people within the cut and two people outside. If you want to make it in the cut, you should have to take it from someone already there, at least that seems more fun/fair, and also prevents collusion.
i.e. 31/40/41/49, 32/39/42/48, etc. Of course since there’s multiple “cuts” to consider, and the range of people with more than a Longshot to make the cut may be large. But in general getting two people inside the cut and two outside the cut seems like the goal to strive for, if possible. ( Maybe 1 in and 3 out if the numbers work that way?)
As someone who was in the 40s for round 10 last year and won my group to make it in, it does seem like I should have had to beat someone already in the cut to get in.
