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BGonline.org Forums
Bill Davis is Smarter Than You Think (long and rambling in places)
Posted By: Robert Maier In Response To: Bill Davis is Smarter Than You Think (Coolrey)
Date: Thursday, 18 June 2009, at 7:43 a.m.
Ray...Many of us have been of the opinion that it is too hard to earn an ABT point. Several participation based solutions have been proposed, or systems that earn points for wins. But, that was not how Bill set it up and there is resistance to change... and it WORKS the way it is.
I so feel like I'm about to step into quicksand....but whatever.
it *WORKS* the way it is.....how exactly does it work? Better yet, how does the way it works mesh with what appears to be the primary goal of most of these recent discussions - how do we get more people into backgammon and attending more tournaments? It doesn't appear to me that the ABT, as is currently set up, really does this.
I'm sitting in my hotel room right now, way past my bedtime, at a bridge tournament in Saratoga Springs NY. The American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) charges folks ~$15 each for the right to play ~25 hands of bridge over a 4 hour period. They offer no chance at all of winning any money. All they offer are masterpoints. If you accumulate enough of them, you will be crowned a Life Master (LM). It's a title that used to mean something in the world of bridge, because it was difficult to obtain those points in quantity. However, for better or worse, the ACBL figured out that if you made the points more accessible without changing the requirements for LM, you would give, well.....*BAD* bridge players a bigger incentive to travel to play in your tournaments. It surely works, I have been a part of the bridge scene for a long time, and I can tell you that there are many thousands of people walking around in ACBL land that can proudly proclaim that they are LMs that only barely understand a few of the most elementary aspects of the game. They paid their money, racked up many many 12th place overall finishes in "big" games or section tops in segregated games where no one of any skill is actually competing, and they *earned* their LM status. The ones that haven't can be heard talking all around the hotel...."I only need 5 more gold points to make LM", or, "I'm going down to Gaitlinburg in April, they give out the most points at that tournament". Not that it means anything, but I earned all of my LM gold points in the very first event I competed in where they were available, and it was for finishing first in the _second_ *strat* of the event I was playing in. That was 15 years ago, and it has gotten much worse. It is actually now possible for a person to earn over 5/6 of the points required for LM status without competing against a single LM. For bad players, they are nothing more than attendance awards....but they come to pick them up, and they definitely would not be making the drive and paying the hotel fees if not for that eventual reward. The LM title still means a great deal to them, which either says much about their perception or mine. Most events are split into 3 stratifications, and the LM level is not even the top of the bottom strat, often it is not even half of that level.
So to attempt to make some point before I run out of room here, attendance based rewards do have a track record of increasing attendance at events and people are obsessed with the collection of fractions of points which can be earned for even mediocre results. God help me for saying it, but some type system that rewards folks for individual wins would probably serve to increase attendance at ABT events. Don't make it part of the ABT points system, just start a system whereby participants can earn "points" for wins in *all* events, depending on whatever you want them to depend on (match length at least). The folks that play all weekend and don't cash but can claim to have earned 8.5 points for the 10 wins they racked up in the blitzes will then at least have something tangible they can point to when deciding whether to shell out the next $1K to go to the next tournament.
Another thing the ACBL has done to promote the attempt to accumulate gobs of masterpoints, they have yearly races that people qualify for based on the number of points they started the year with. They award ..... well something, maybe just a certificate or the like, for the player who earns the most points during the year who started with less than 50, or 25, or 500, etc. If you had a point system in bg that applied to all events at a tournament, you could run the same sort of arrangement. You'd have people in the intermediate ranks racing to out earn their peers for the year. Under the current system, only players at the Open level have a shot at winning any title. Also, there is no award at all for doing well in other events. At the end of the year, someone with 3 wins in the main ABT event may win the title, while someone who wins 3 masters events may not even appear on the list, and the advanced player who travels a little and grinds out a couple of ABT cashes, a blitz win and two good quickie results isn't able to view his own place in the scheme of things.
Anyway, what was the other point of all of this....oh, yeah, I remember now. Ray and others have repeatedly asked, rhetorically, what other sports or competitions don't keep stats. The ACBL. Nowhere is it possible to obtain any compiled statistic, except for the total number of masterpoints accrued for the week/month/year/forever....and only for those at the "top" of the list. You will never find something like wins per event entered or average matchpoint percentage for the last year's worth of events or number of times you've gone down two in 3 no trump with 10 top tricks or anything of the sort. You will only see your 45% matchpoint score in print if it was good enough for a section second in the bottom strat worth 0.25 red points. And the ACBL is that organization which is basically surviving now on the backs of the bad players it continues to draw to its events.....
And suddenly it seems like I see where Bill Davis and a few others are coming from. In order to grow the game, we must avoid casting light on the less able players and compile statistics which would only serve to force them to face the fact that they are mediocre at best, but rather, find other ways to reward them. Which is where I start to get a little nauseous, but the world works the way it works and has never cared whether it sickened me. Before I pass out, I could even suggest the different types of points, with the black ones issued for club play, and red ones being issued for smaller ABT tournaments and side events at the bigger tournaments, with the inevitable gold points being issued to the main event(s) at the biggest tournamaents. And of course there is no end to the various promotional events that could be offered so that folks that don't want to travel as much are more inclined to attend their local club or nearby "regional" in order to try and earn the elusive pigmented points that might be otherwise unobtainable on their match to be crowned...what....backgammon brutus?? Maybe we could name all the different points after gemstones so it doesn't seem too much like we are thieving it directly from the ACBL. I can't even tell if I'm being sarcastic or not. It seems ridiculous, yet here I am at my umpteenth regional event and it unquestionably is a strategy that works.
I'm certainly not going to now argue that we should burn all the statistics. Maybe some of the folks that are thinking about ELO ratings can start thinking instead about how to construct an additional points/rewards system that entices all players to start chasing things in the backgammon world, rather than just the elite. Seriously, I'd like a chance to win something too.
Don't look at me for additional advice, though, I feel dirty enough as it is.
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