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21.24% wins ACBL Masterpoints

#21 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2015-February-05, 09:58

You could even consider it a feature. Flighting and stratifying are ways to allow even poor players to occasionally win things, which keeps them from being totally discouraged and giving up on the game. They don't win a lot, most of the masterpoints still go to the good players, so it's not that unbalanced.

#22 User is offline   Bbradley62 

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Posted 2015-February-06, 19:25

The stratification is so bogus. I just completed a 26-player (non ACBL) MP Robodupe; 9A, 8B, 9C. The top 8 finishers were 1A, 3B and 4C. (The A was 4th.) Best I can tell, this is not really standard, but the C strata fairly consistently holds its own with the others.

This has been covered in other threads, but... as a member of C strata (since I have very few BBO masterpoints), I hate seeing my in-game standing with respect to my strata -- I'd much prefer to see my overall position. Maybe this is different in ACBL games if you're using ACBL masterpoints, as there may be a stronger correlation between masterpoint holding and skill level.
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#23 User is offline   1eyedjack 

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Posted 2015-February-07, 05:23

View PostBbradley62, on 2015-February-06, 19:25, said:

I hate seeing my in-game standing with respect to my strata -- I'd much prefer to see my overall position.
That would also be my preference. But perhaps some would prefer the existing setup. It would only take up a tiny amount of screen space to show both. Maybe not practical with the mobile app. Maybe give the user the choice in settings?
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#24 User is offline   ArtK78 

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Posted 2015-February-09, 15:51

How do you like this situation:

Sectional Swiss Teams. The event is being run as a Bracketed Swiss Teams, with 47 teams total. The bottom 32 teams are divided into four 8-team brackets and they play a round-robin within their brackets. But that is not the interesting part. The top bracket has 15 teams. Within the top bracket, there is a further division of Flight A teams and Flight X teams. The Flight A teams play only for the overall position among the 15 teams in the top bracket. The Flight X teams, which consists of the lowest ranked 8 of the 15 teams in the top bracket, are competing both for the overall position among the 15 teams in the top bracket and also for the overall position among the 8 teams in the X bracket. Teams are matched up against each other by their position in the event after the first round, without any consideration as to whether they are Flight A or Flight X, as in any Swiss Team event.

Since there were an odd number of teams, there is one three-way round-robin match run over 2 rounds. My team was in the round-robin match in the first two rounds. There were six matches, so there were three round-robin matches. After the first two rounds, the lowest ranked three teams are put into the round-robin (with one exception discussed below).

After 4 matches, one of the X teams had managed to score 31 VPs on an average of 40. They were put into the round-robin along with two other X teams that had scores of 29 VPs and 18 VPs. There was another team that had 30 VPs after 4 rounds, but since they had just played in the rounds 3 & 4 round-robin, they were not put back into the round robin for the last two rounds (no team plays in two consecutive round-robins regardless of their score).

So, these three teams, with 31 VPs, 29 VPs and 18 VPs, played in a round robin for the last two rounds. The team with 31 VPs scored 37 out of a possible 40 VPs in the two round-robin matches, finishing with a total of 68 VPs on an average of 60. This was enough to WIN the flight X event. They actually finished 6th in the Flight A event, only 3 VPs out of 5th. Flight A had 5 overall places.

By beating up on the two lowest ranked teams in the event, this team won 7.28 masterpoints by winning the Flight X event.
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#25 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2015-February-10, 15:51

I think it's been established in the past that Swiss is reasonably good at determining the best and worst teams, but very poor at ranking the teams in the middle. When you combine that with stratification, you can easily get weird results like that. There's probably something theoretically wrong with ranking within X but not taking strats into account when making pairings. But as a part of ACBL's business strategy, which is based on everyone having an occasional opportunity to earn some masterpoints, it's perfect.

For the record, since I've had to play in A/X at our sectionals, I don't think I've ever gotten anything other than match awards.

#26 User is online   mycroft 

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Posted 2015-February-11, 10:26

4x7 Swiss is a crapshoot for anything past the top two teams, really. And depending on the order, first can be obvious and second/third may just depend on when they play the first-place team.

But it's a fun game. Unless you go (very legitimately) 0-3 and get drawn against the 3rd or 4th best team in the room for the last round (who also went 0-3, but I believe had a much stronger Strength of Field than we did that night!) Ah well, the next week we went 3-0 and had a much easier draw, even in the 4th round. The Computer Giveth, and the Computer Taketh Away.
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#27 User is offline   ArtK78 

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Posted 2015-February-11, 10:32

View Postmycroft, on 2015-February-11, 10:26, said:

4x7 Swiss is a crapshoot for anything past the top two teams, really. And depending on the order, first can be obvious and second/third may just depend on when they play the first-place team.

But it's a fun game. Unless you go (very legitimately) 0-3 and get drawn against the 3rd or 4th best team in the room for the last round (who also went 0-3, but I believe had a much stronger Strength of Field than we did that night!) Ah well, the next week we went 3-0 and had a much easier draw, even in the 4th round. The Computer Giveth, and the Computer Taketh Away.


This is a full day event - 6 matches, 9 boards each. 15 teams in the top bracket, of which 8 are in the lower tier (the "X" flight). So, all teams meet almost one-half of the other 14 teams in the bracket.
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#28 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2015-February-11, 11:26

While 9 board matches are better than the common 7-board matches in 8-match Swiss teams, they're still pretty random. A couple of big swings can totally throw them. Conversion to VPs damps this a bit, but you still have to take the results with a grain of salt.

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