Tournament advice! Been a while!!! TGP advice please!

I have a question and this seems like a good thread to ask it in. How do I calculate TGP for PAPA style qualifying? I am looking to set up a multi day event with qualifying and finals. I do not understand how to calculate the TGP for qualifying.

From the TGP guide - TGP Guide


PAPA Style Qualifying (Card Based)

1 game added to TGP per game counted towards a qualifying ticket

If unlimited qualifying attempts are available, the number of hours of open qualifying will increase TGP by 1% per hour up to 20% for open qualifying of 20+ hours

Please note this format is not IFPA endorsed unless there is a finals component that involves DIRECT play, made up of at least 10% of the participants

Please note the qualifying portion of the tournament can be added to the TGP calculation only if that qualifying portion reduces the field of participants by 50% or more


So say I want to do something similar to what Pintastic did in MA. They had a 12 game bank, and 5 games counted per card. Unlimited qualifying. The TGP guide there seems to be saying an event with a 5 game card is worthā€¦ 5 games towards the 25 I need for 100% TGP? That canā€™t be right can it?

I see Pintastic got 100% TGP for their event and I suppose I could just copy that format exactly and hope for the best, but Iā€™d rather understand it.

How is TGP calculated for qualifying PAPA style? Suppose a 12-15 game bank, and 5 games per card.

Thank you!

Iā€™m guessing your confusion lies in the conflation of using the acronym ā€œTGPā€ to mean two different things by the IFPA website, and also often in threads. Iā€™m guilty of it, too.
TGP, when talking about %, is the the Tournament Grading Percentage. Current max base = 100%
TGP, when talking about games, is the Total Games Played. Current max base = 25 meaningful games.

@pinwizj I highly suggest the IFPA web pages regarding this get cleaned up into TGP just for grading %, and we eliminate use of using TGP when referring to games played. And adopt the acronym MGP for Meaningful Games Played.

Thatā€™s correct. Those 5 games count as 20% TGP (4% per meaningful game playedā€¦ 5x4 = 20)

And youā€™ve already captured the other component of card-based (Indirect) qualifying toward TGP: take your # of hours of qualifying, and you also get to add that # to your % of TGP, up to a max of 20 hours. So if you have 10 hours of unlimited qualifying, then you get to add another 10% to your TGP.

You now have a total of 30% TGP from your qualifying.

Last, to establish your total TGP for your event, you add on your TGP earned from the number of meaningful games played in your finals, keeping in mind that if you use 4-player matches in finals, you get to multiply the ACTUAL games played by x2 to calculate your MEANINGFUL games played.

Example: you take 8 players to finals, playing PAPA-style 4-player, 3-game finals rounds. There will be a total of two rounds.
Finals MGP (Meaningful Games Played) = 2 rounds x [3 games] x2 = 12 MGP. The last ā€œx2ā€ is because they are 4-player games.
Each Meaningful Game Played adds 4% to your TGP %. So you get to add 48% TGP from your finals.

Total TGP for your event = 78%.

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Thanks Snailman for the explanation.

So it seems like for PAPA style and Best Game style events, the bulk of the wpprs come from the Finals, and not the 2 full days / 20 hours of qualifying. That seems off to me. I canā€™t imagine throwing an event that takes 3 full days and then telling people we managed to earn 78% TGP.

Iā€™d be better off just having 3 individual 4-strike events over the 3 days, and maybe throw in a Frenzy or two before it gets nerfed.

Yep. Those are more fun anyway. Haha

The section on TGP has always referred to that acronym as ā€œTournament Grading Percentageā€.

The TGP will be based on the expected number of meaningful games that the winner of a tournament will play, with 4% added to the TGP for each meaningful game played. A guide to help determine the meaningful games played metric is available HERE .

I could add ā€œMRPā€ after meaningful games played in every possible instance on our website, but I donā€™t believe that will stop people from getting confused about how this stuff is calculated.

This stuff is just confusing for most people. Itā€™s part of the reason I support @timballs not posting how he calculates the value of his metric. Being transparent just leads to more confusion and more questions :slight_smile:

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What you are missing in that vast amount of open qualifying is the amount of data youā€™re throwing away as ā€œnot meaningfulā€.

You can have 2 days of qualifying, but you have players like Keith Elwin show up for an hour, play one entry, and be ā€œdoneā€.

Another player can show up and play 400 games of pinball trying to qualify, but the tournament format is choosing to ignore 395 of those games in determining the skill level of that player by only taking that best run of 5 games in calculating the qualifying standings.

The more meaningful data you count . . .the more MGP towards TGP you get :slight_smile:

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@pinwizj itā€™s the way that ā€œTGPā€ is used in sentences in the TGP Guide:
ā€œ1 game added to TGP per game counted towards a qualifying ticketā€ is confusing, because you donā€™t add 1 game to TGP, you add 4% to the TGP (for that 1 game).
ā€œonly 5 games will be added to the TGPā€ etc.

Iā€™d also recommend spelling out ā€œTournament Grading Percentageā€ at the top of the TGP Guide, for additional clarity. Itā€™s only spelled out in the WPPR Rules page.

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@chuckwurt Hah! Wait, do you mean the 4 strike or the frenzy? :grinning:

Updated. I anxiously await for this to no longer be confusing.

As a bonus I added a paragraph :slight_smile:

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@pinwizj

What you are missing in that vast amount of open qualifying is the amount of data youā€™re throwing away as ā€œnot meaningfulā€.

Thatā€¦ makes a lot of sense when you explain it that way. I guess Iā€™m just surprised at how inefficient the format is for the time spent. In any case, my question is answered and today I learned that the choice of Finals format is fairly critical when setting up a PAPA style event. Thanks!

The advantages are large prize pools, allows you to use far fewer games, and allows for much larger player counts.

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I was confused in this case specifically because the Best Game Style Qualifying (Herb) section has an example, but the PAPA Style Qualifying (Card Based) section does not have an example.

Best Game section says
ā€œIf 9 games are available but only 5 games are counted towards your qualifying standing, only 5 games will count as meaningful towards the TGP calculationā€

If the PAPA Style section had something similar, perhaps ā€œIf 12 games are available but only 5 games are counted on each card entry, then only 5 games will count as meaningful towards the TGP calculationā€ I believe I would have understood. It was the lack of an example that made me sure I needed to ask.

Thank you!

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Updated.

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Colinā€™s example was great to understand TGP, but not a great example of how to run a 3 day tournament. In the real world, you almost always take a minimum of 16 qualifiers for finals which means you get 3 rounds of 3 game PAPA-style finals worth 72% on its own. Add in the 20% for the 5 game ticket (or even just 16% for a four game ticket) and all you need is 8 hours of qualifying for a 5 card ticket to get to 100% or 12 hours of qualifying for a 4 card ticket to get to 100%. So plan on there being at least 16 finalist and your tournament is now full value. If you have a lot of players (more than 48), then you can take 24 to finals and give the top 8 a bye. If you have over 80 players, then you can take 40 to the finals and offer double byes to top 4 and single byes to the next 12 (bottom 24 players play in 6 groups of 4, then the next 12 come in for another round of 6 groups of 4, then the remaining 12 each get a double bye player and youā€™re at your round of 16). Note that IFPA only counts the meaningful finals games in the rounds with the shorted path, so you donā€™t get to count those first two rounds, but it doesnā€™t matter because you just need three meaningful rounds of finals and a reasonable set of hours of qualifying to get to 100%.

IMO, this is definitely how you should try and run your multi-day tournament(s) if you want your player base to collectively improve and learn how most of the ā€œbigā€ tournaments actually work. Or you could run silly two-a-day matchplays or FFs without finals over a long weekend and farm a bunch of meaningless WPPRs which apparently ā€œeveryoneā€ ā€œlovesā€ nowā€¦ YMMV.

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I remember when the first conversations about TGP focused around making sure PAPA over its 4 days of glory hit that 100% level, and that the other events would fall in line value wise below that.

Boy was I wrong :slight_smile:

Is TGP for bye finals shortest path or average path ?

We calculate the EV and use that.

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What in the world - this looks like a Vegas black Jack basic strategy table lol

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Haha. Forgot about that chart.

And here we learn that Rayday plays in a lot of tournaments but doesnā€™t TD any. :smile: Iā€™ve seen and used that chart countless times!

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