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Sunday, August 22, 2010

Strength of Schedule (SoS) as a scoring rubric for competitive events



A local poster was kind enough to explain to me how to use SoS as a scoring rubric for competitive gaming. It's really quite simple. Basically you give each player bonus points based upon their competitors' wins. So for example suppose player A played against players B, D and F. Here are the W/L for his opponents:

B: 2W - 1L
D: 3W - 0L
F: 1W - 2L

Player A would score a total of 6 bonus points. You could use these bonus points as a tie breaker. Assume that the tournament is setup such that you can only win or lose each round (ala NOVA system component).

G

4 comments:

Mike Brandt; mvbrandt@gmail said...

Steve,

Are you going to pare it down to a single undefeated? It's not hard to do, esp. if you have 2 days either way for the event.

If you *ARE* you could use strength of schedule to moderate final seedings for the people who pass through undefeated (as uneven #'s can force you to grant byes in some situations, not that you'll do that, to avoid having 4-0 players get free rides off 3-1's late in the tourney, for example).

Terminus Est said...

Hi Mike

Thanks for dropping by to provide your input. As you know I liked your approach you used and want to emulate some of it. Same thing with how BoLS ran their GT (i.e., split players into two groups on second day). We are planning on using Swiss style pairings like you did on the second day of NOVA. Let's suppose we had 32 players show up. We would need to run 5 rounds for the upper group to have one undefeated player (tie breakers implemented to prevent any draws like you did)...

After round 1: 16
After round 2: 8
After round 3: 4 (end of 1st day)
After round 4: 2
After round 5: 1 (end of 2nd day)

If we could pull 64 players then we would need another round. My guess is we will probably draw around 50 players this time. SoS could be used as either bonus points if we use battle points or as another tie breaker applied at the end if we decide to go with W/L (i.e., no battle points).

G

Danny Internets said...

I was discussing the problem of the escalating number of games required to find an undefeated player with our local TO in reference to a large event we're planning for the Columbus Day weekend. If you start with the NOVA format of scoring, an alternative to increasing the number of games is to separate out the players on Day 2 based on seeding and run a second Day 2 championship which functions as a standalone tournament with Day 1 essentially being a qualifier.

For instance:

64 players on Day 1
After game 1: 32 undefeated
After game 2: 16 undefeated
After game 3: 8 undefeated

If you want to stick with a 3 and 2 games/day format you can then select the top 4 seeded undefeated players and only advance them to Day 2:

4 players on Day 2
After game 4: 2 undefeated
After game 5: 1 undefeated

Of course, this is somewhat arbitrary and arguably dilutes one of the most salient features of the system (the elimination of battle points for ranking), but it certainly makes the swiss pairing format much more flexible.

Furthermore, if you select the groups arbitrarily based on seeding (derived from the formula used at NOVA, for instance) you can hold multiple championship brackets on Day 2 at various levels. For instance, the top 4 would be competing for tournament winner, while the next 4 could also play each other for champion of the next bracket down, and so on. That way you can spread the prizes out more and give players something to do on Day 2 other than twiddle their thumbs. The brackets could be referred to as Diamond Bracket (for the championship), Gold Bracket, Silver Bracket, etc., to denote the varying levels of performance from the qualifier.

Terminus Est said...

Those are great ideas Danny. I like the concept of multiple tournaments on Day 2.

I am planning on using P/S/T with no splits on any of these. That is, only one player can score points for primary, secondary or tertiary. I have seen too many games where players gamed the mission and split the points to max out rather than lose. This will help to provide another degree of separation.

G