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BGonline.org Forums
My take on the Giants list
Posted By: Albert Steg In Response To: My take on the Giants list (Matt Cohn-Geier)
Date: Monday, 22 February 2016, at 5:20 p.m.
The virtue of generating a Giants List based on the subjective voting of a community of players is that, in a game in which short-term outcomes are unreliable indicators of excellence, it provides a way of pooling the judgment of those in the best position to ‘see through’ these ephemeral results. If such a List is valued, it must be because no single backgammon Event is seen as providing the answer to “Who are the Best?” and because it is felt that quantitative measures derived from tournament results also fail to capture true excellence of play in the way that, say a football or baseball season does reasonably well.
For a community to generate a credible Giants List that enjoys broad agreement and respect, the voters need to form a genuine community — that is, there needs to be sufficient overlap of personal association, experience, and identity such that there is a strongly felt sense of commonality / connection amongst the pool of players and candidates. Whatever the conditions were when the Giants List began in 1993, it seems clear from recent discussions that it does not currently reflect a coherent ‘community’ of backgammon players.
It seems to me that the project of generating a Giants List that credibly encompasses the entire global community by appealing to subjective, open voting is simply not feasible. As Matt suggests in his video, no one has enough perspective on the group of candidates as a whole, and lopsided voting participation skews the results in all sorts of fatal ways. So, it seems to me that you have a few options:
a) You narrow the sense of community geographically so that voters have a better chance to actually know who they’re talking about: Giants of Denmark / Giants of Spain / Giants of the USA — perhaps narrowing the spots on each list to 16. I think these sorts of lists might be quite interesting to see, and would encourage some national pride, which unfortunately seems to be a source of friction in the current ‘World Giants’ list. Perhaps there could be an annual event in which only these National Giants are invited to participate. (As opposed to a single Open tournament that rather arbitrarily claims to crown the ‘World Champion’.)
b) You find means of restricting the voting to a community of people who are in a position to really Know. If it’s going to be an International Giants List, this would mean getting together a credible panel of say a dozen people active in international backgammon and empowering them to take into account tournament results, frequency of play, PR’s, Master Points from various systems, and yes, subjective popular voting from the hot polloi whose input would be taken as one among several reflections of excellence. Their bi-annual findings might come in the form of not simply a blunt list, but also a brief statement as to the achievements that earned each individual a spot on the list. This approach could also take into account various forms of money play as far as it could be known (are there truly no Giants who eschew tournament play altogether?) Another, less involved approach would be to just narrow the field of voters to those who actually won major tournaments, or using some other means of weighting frequently successful players more heavily than those who barely participated.
c) You do both a & b — create credible panels of experts in each country who follow a similar approach, and then you take the Top Giant from each List and voila, an International Giants of Backgammon list, and the makings of a high-profile international tournament event.
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