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Proposal for new tournament format, partly "stolen" from Bridge team tournaments.(Warning: Long)
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: Proposal for new tournament format, partly "stolen" from Bridge team tournaments.(Warning: Long) (Ivar Røynstrand)
Date: Wednesday, 22 October 2008, at 3:23 a.m.
Do indeed keep all ideas coming, but my reaction to Ivar's proposal is also negative.
As Bob noted, the proposal has some similarities to Jakob Garal's "Fair Backgammon," which I have critiqued before. I think my comments on Jakob's proposal are in the gammonlife.com "Fair Backgammon" forum (in summary, I wrote that I think match play is more challenging than money play, that the scoring system was too complicated, and (most importantly) there's nothing "unfair" about tournament backgammon now).
I'm not sure that Ivar's proposal actually has the advantages claimed for it.
* Much easier to get a good timeschedule for a tournament.
I think most TD's have a pretty good idea how long X-length matches should last, and schedule accordingly. Tournaments go off schedule because some players show up late or take extra long breaks and because some players play too slowly and aren't sped up until it's too late. The proposal is for 7 rounds in a (short!) 6.75-hour day with 5.5 hours of play time. In the same day-length, one could schedule, for example, 4 rounds of 9-point matches, for a 6.75-hour day and 6 hours of play time. And since any games started before the 45 minutes were up would be played to completion, might that not seriously affect the schedule?
* Easier to separate players, players with tied scores will be less frequent.
It's not difficult to separate tie scores in a traditional monrad tournament by using corrections. The corrections system can seem arbitrary. But is it more arbitrary than, say, the "VP effect" of one 16-cube or a couple of 8-cubes?
* More games for every player.
Maybe. How many games would be played in 45 (or 45-plus) minutes? How many games would be played in match play scheduled for the same time period? It's true that in a traditional tournament, some matches are one-sided and short, which turns scheduled playing time in those matches into waiting time. But most matches aren't short. And wouldn't the proposal encourage a player who was lucky enough to build up an early big lead to play as slowly as possible for the remainder of the 45 minutes?
* A few (small) early losses does not mean that you cannot win or at least get a good result.
The same is true for a traditional monrad tournament -- if you lose the first match or first two matches, you can still win all the rest. But it seems to me that under the proposal a player could break even or even lose in six matches, win big in one match, and end up with the top score. That doesn't sound like an improvement.
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