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BGonline.org Forums
Madison Playoff Brackets
Posted By: Bill In Response To: Madison Playoff Brackets (Chuck Bower)
Date: Tuesday, 8 September 2009, at 2:58 p.m.
After getting a little rest, I am finally catching up here. To address the points in some reasonable order...
1) It has historically been the case with this format that the TD sat down after round 8 and decided based on the records of current players how to proceed. I am uncomfortable with this because it isn't transparent and obvious, but it does work.
2) Last year we tried to use the algorithm that Bob Koca spelled out in this forum. It was clean and simple and looked like it should work. We ran several simulated tournaments and the algorithm worked very well, so we posted it at the tourney and followed it. After we posted the playoff draw, Neil showed us that if we had run another round of Swiss, we would have had a much cleaner playoff. Given the quirks of the format, it wasn't clear whether we accidentally stumbled upon a rare case where the algorithm broke down, or if there was some inherent flaw in the algorithm. In either case, we did not advertise that we would be following the algorithm this year.
3) Several people, including Neil and Patrick Gibson, are encouraging us to take the Swiss into more rounds. Ten or eleven seems right for approx 50 players. The advantage is that we don't have to make an opaque decision about a playoff format. This disadvantage is that we cannot post the payouts in time for people to hedge. Tom, Beth, Sonya and I will do more work on this in the next year to understand the suggestion better, but we did not comprehend it well enough to impose it on the tournament this year.
4) Given the suggestion above and the result from last year, we decided to be more biased toward a ninth (or even tenth) round of playoffs this year when doing our evaluation after round 8. After round 7, it looked very likely that we would have a 9th round of Swiss and we made the mistake of saying that out loud. I apologize if anyone felt mislead.
5) After dinner, Tom, Beth and I sat down to evaluate and discovered the details that Neil shared above. There was a 50% chance that we would come out with a very ugly playoff structure after round 9. Then we looked at the way it worked to move to a playoff right away and the results were so clean that the decision was obvious. There was no input from any players. We did not discuss the format at dinner. We did eat a lot of garlic Nan and chicken tiki-masala, but that shouldn't have affected the decision too much.
Like I said before, my primary difficulty with the current method is the lack of transparency. I did my best to explain our decision making process to the players after the draw was posted, but obviously I couldn't speak individually with everyone. Please feel free to post or email more questions.
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