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Some thoughts about draws

Posted By: Sam Pottle
Date: Friday, 11 April 2008, at 10:57 p.m.

In Response To: drawsheet mishaps (Bob Koca)

Who all has looked at how the byes filter through on the commonly used drawsheets?

Their designers, mostly.

It seems like there should be a literature for this stuff, but I've never found one. In the backgammon community, serious thinking about draws is largely a solitary activity. Occasionally there are conversations, in groups of (at most) two.

I looked and it seemed that a straightforward switching of places where people entered the last chance would have avoided that scenario without any negative consequences.

Did you verify that this would be the case for every possible number of players between 33 and 64?

The problem is that a single drawsheet has to work properly for a large range of possible field sizes. When considering where to feed the loser of a given match, it's not always easy to know whether that player has had a bye. This problem is more severe for progressive LC draws (or double elimination w/consolation), because players are feeding down twice, and may receive byes in either of the "upper" flights. That said, it's disappointing that you had those experiences in a 56 player field. We should be able to do better than that.

One of the nice things about having a 48 player draw (yay Jeb!) is that you can design a 64 player draw in the knowledge that seeds 1-48 will be occupied by warm bodies. This gives you a lot more leverage in reasoning about what records the players can have at each point. I don't know if anyone has actually done this, however, at least with a progressive LC.

A different approach, which Troy Longman and I use in Las Vegas, is to create a draw ad hoc for the exact field size you have. This gives you great control over which W-L records play which, but it's not very helpful for directors who aren't also drawsheet designers. You also need to know the night before how many players you'll have.

Our community would certainly benefit from somebody taking a systematic look at this stuff, and producing some draws along with a paper, or at least some footnotes explaining their properties. Failing that, a 48 player double elimination w/ consolation draw might be useful.

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