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Tradition of odd length bg matches

Posted By: Tom Keith
Date: Thursday, 4 June 2015, at 1:16 p.m.

In Response To: When to pull goalie in hockey? (OT) (Colin Owen)

Colin asks: Why did this tradition [playing matches to an odd number of points] take hold in our game?

My guess: Even-away scores tend to produce more score-related oddities than odd-away scores. Obvious examples are 2-away/2-away or 4-away/2-away. But the same thing, to a lesser extent, continues at other even-away scores. This is especially true if you play without the Crawford rule, which only became established in the 1970's. The tradition of odd-length matches was already established by then.

The possible advantage with flexibility is mainly in the shorter matches, so they would probably only need to display 4 and 6 point lengths (whilst perhaps also dispensing with the 2!).

If you don't like 2-point matches, presumably you don't like 4-point matches either (because they lead to more 2-away/2-away scores than 3 and 5-pointers do).

This tradition reduces the flexibility of some organisers to provide players with a little more bg.

How much more play do you get from, say, an 8-point match versus a 7-point match? I would think the average difference is pretty small compared to the variance in time needed to play such a match. It is this variance that is the real killer for tournament organisers!

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