There’s been a evolution over the past few years to how I’ve approached pointing for HERB tournaments. Probably worthy of it’s own topic or expanding the existing topic I’ve linked below, where I took a lot of initial influences from.
First, looking at what’s considered standard:
100,90,85,84,83…etc.
This awards 1st and 2nd Place with Bonus Points
Runs out of points after 87 players
I won’t rehash points that were made in that other thread, but since that thread I’ve been very intrigued and have implemented decay-rate based systems for the HERB events that I’m involved with. The goal for this event was to reward the Top 12 on a machine with bonus points, and not just the Top Two. My thought is that somewhere between the Top 10%-20% should get some kind of bump for being that high relative to everyone else, and settled on bonuses for the Top 12.
The +100 was a reaction to last year, when we used a similar scale but it bottomed out a lot quicker (90% decay vs. the 97.5% decay used this year), and a player was able to qualify for Classics by only playing three games. Stellar work by the player, but we wanted to force players to have to play all four games to qualify.
Dovetailing into your # of machines question, the reason we had four was because:
a) That’s what was done in the past when the event qualifying time was MUCH shorter and we limited players to eight tickets.
b) Because we relied on a number of volunteers for bringing machines, we didn’t know exactly how many machines we would have up and running and I didn’t want to force six machines if it turned out we could only get 10 up and running. We were fortunate to have 18 up and running for the event, and I hope we get the same level of dedication from volunteers next year.
Certainly doesn’t mean we won’t change it up next year. I believe the NYCPC does 5, PAPA does 6, and I think TPF did 8 this year. It would force a player to flex across eras on more machines instead of doing what I did by just sticking to early solid state Bally machines.