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Criteria for Giants in US and Overseas
Posted By: Jake Jacobs In Response To: Criteria for Giants in US and Overseas (neilkaz)
Date: Wednesday, 3 June 2009, at 7:01 a.m.
Hi All:
I just created a user profile so I can post to this thread. The following is something I wrote earlier today.
Best,
Jake
Who was the greater quarterback: a) Fran Tarkenton; b) Terry Bradshaw?
Admittedly it is a short list. And with it come several assumptions: that you are interested in football; that you are old enough to be familiar with these two players; and that you have an opinion as to which was better. I have one more assumption, which I’ll get to later.
Nearly two years have passed since the last Giant 32 list was published, and we are gearing up for 2010. As we do, so do the debaters, questioning the list’s design, its implementation, indeed its existence. Nothing wrong with that! That people care enough to inveigh against it is in some sense a justification of its existence.
To understand the list we need to consider its origin. When Yamin conceived the list FIBS was already in existence, but may not have had a singe US member. Certainly Chicago’s backgammon community didn’t discover it until a year later. In 1993 very few people had internet accounts, and terms like “email” and “surfing the web” were as obscure as “Laodicean.” Neural net bots were on the horizon, but none were commercially available. KG published a rating list (itself dogged by at least one major controversy), but felt compelled to write the article “Who is Harry Zilli?” because the world’s highest-rated player was a person no one had ever heard of.
The Giant 32 came from a simple yet powerful idea. If you found yourself playing in Peoria, and wanted to know who the best local player was, all you’d have to do was ask the local players. (I’ve played in Peoria, but forgot to ask.) If you have a local club, or local chouette, you probably have a pretty good idea of who you’d rather not see sending a doubling cube your way. (There are always exceptions. I remember a chouette at Howard Ring’s house. There were ten players. including Howard, Neil Kazaross, Rich Lloyd, David Wells, Yamin, me, Wendy Kaplan, Tak Morioka, and Bob Zavoral. That’s a tough crowd, and while you might not get ten different answers as to the best player, if you asked the tenth player who was best, he would have said: “Dean Muench.”) Yamin reasoned that what worked locally would work globally if only you asked the right people.
In the years since we have tried to keep things simple, and transparent. That means that as much as possible we stay out of the way of the voters. If you have ever played in, or directed, a live regional tournament at the open level you qualify as a voter. The “live” part is the most controversial, now that so much backgammon happens online. We rejected a voter a few years ago despite some impressive lobbyists arguing on his behalf. He then went out and played in some tournaments. Problem solved!
We also don’t tell people how to vote. Even the list that appears on the back of the ballot creates problems for us every year. Folks, there is only so much room on a sheet of paper! That list is meant as a memory aid, not as an endorsement (or rejection) but every revision leads to complaints about who is or isn’t listed. We’d get rid of it entirely, but most people say they rely on it. And while we restrict who may vote, we don’t restrict who receives votes. I saw a comment from Neil that money players shouldn’t be eligible. If he doesn’t care to vote for money players, fair enough! Neil is a big boy, and I trust him to vote judiciously. But were it not for money play it is highly unlikely that Neil’s good friend, and the Giant’s dearly missed auditor, the late Howard Ring, would have made the list any time in the nineties. Howard Ring is a testament to the power of the list – few would deny that he belonged on the list, and his victory in the last World Cup vindicated the judgment of the voters that put him there, but without the list the average player might never have heard of him. There is a player today that, so far as I know, only plays in one private tournament a year, and otherwise plays only for money. I have heard several players, most of them Giants, suggest that he is the world’s number one player. I won’t name him, because I don’t want to influence any votes, but will tell you that he has played in major tournaments in the past, that he is famous, and that his name usually does appear among the Giants. (And if you are all dying of curiosity, there is one more endorsement of the List.)
Which brings me back to Terry Bradshaw and Fran Tarkenton… Many of the suggestions these days involve the bots, of using Snowie or GNU to rate the players. I will ignore the tactical problems such suggestions entail. I said at the outset that there was an assumption I was making that I would get to later. It’s later. The assumption I made was that if you have an opinion most of you feel strongly that Bradshaw was the greater quarterback. That is the common belief. Snowie and GNU provide statistical analysis of backgammon players; statistical analysis exists for football players. Statistically it isn’t close: Tarkenton was not just better, he was much better. In Snowie terms, he was playing at 2.5 to Bradshaw’s 5.5.
We could debate it, but I am not here to talk football. The people who will insist Bradshaw was better base their analysis on a few key games (Super Bowls) and their belief that they had sufficient judgment to “see” who played like a champ, and who choked in the Big One. If you are a Bradshaw partisan, congratulations: you now understand how the Giant 32 works. (I’m a Tark man myself, but know I could be wrong.)
Keep something else in mind, while spinning grand schemes for improving things. The list takes a lot of work, much more than most people realize, and that work is done by a very few people. Your suggestions may all be improvements, but if they can’t be implemented they won’t be. There is one simple fix that will make the list better: get lots of people to vote! That means that everyone reading this should make sure they vote (if eligible) and everyone should remind their eligible friends to vote as well.
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