[mike777]

JanM, on Aug 16 2007, 08:08 PM, said:

mike777, on Aug 16 2007, 07:23 PM, said:

Pros get paid for another event, sponsors have another shot at glory at a cost that is close to zero for them. Nobodies have a shot since no one else shows up..seem perfect.

Another Trials would be far from free, for anyone - the players who'd have to take the time out of their schedules, pay for plane, hotel, meals, etc; the sponsors who'd ditto plus pay the pros; the USBF volunteers who are already stretched pretty thin. It's just not going to happen.

ok thank you for your comments..it is not going to happen...but this is starting to sound more like a money problem not a time issue but anyway ...

If 2 or 20 nobody or seminobody teams only show up for usa2 trials this sounds like a great thing for bridge. The pros and sponsors are too busy with busy lives so why veto the rest of us..oh well....The highest goal is not for usa2 to be the best team..or the team that can win.

ok 2 trials out....

[TimG]

Suppose 16 teams qualify from a round robin to a USA1 bracket.

• After Round 1 of the KO phase, there will be 8 winners still in USA1 bracket, and 8 losers who go to USA2 bracket.
  
• After round 2, there will be 4 winners in USA1 bracket and 8 one-time losers in USA2 bracket (4 winners from USA2 bracket and 4 losers from USA1 bracket).
  
• After round 3, there will be 2 winners in USA1 bracket and 6 one-time losers in USA2 bracket (4 winners from USA2 bracket and 2 losers from USA2 bracket).
  
• After round 4, there will be one winner in USA1 bracket and 4 one-time losers in USA2 bracket (3 winners from USA2 bracket and 1 loser form USA1 bracket).
  
• The remaining team in USA1 is crowned USA1 and the four teams in USA2 play two more rounds of KOs to determine USA2.

When there are teams with byes into the KO phase of the event, the number of teams coming out of the round robin may have to change and some of the teams may need to be sent immediately to USA2 bracket.

When one team has a bye into the round of 8, the round robin needs to produce 14 teams for USA1 bracket and 2 teams for USA2 bracket.

When two teams have a bye into the round of 8, the round robin needs to produce 12 teams for USA1 bracket and 4 teams for USA2 bracket.

When one team has a bye into the round of 8 and one team has a bye into the round of 4, the round robin needs to produce 10 teams for USA1 bracket and 10 teams for USA2 bracket.

When two teams have a bye into the round of 8 and one team has a bye into the round of 4, the round robin needs to produce 8 teams for USA1 bracket and 12 teams for USA2 bracket.

When teams have a bye into the round of 16, it is a simple matter to adjust the number of teams qualifying from the round robin into USA1 bracket.

I seem to recall that the KO matches in the trials are longer than one day. If they are day and a half affairs (6 segments of 16 boards) the above would fulfill the condition that the USA2 result takes no more than three extra days.

[matmat]

i don't really see why you need knockouts... what's wrong with taking the top 7 teams after the early round robin and running a second such competition with 6 rounds, taking the top two teams?

[mike777]

matmat, on Aug 16 2007, 09:56 PM, said:

i don't really see why you need knockouts... what's wrong with taking the top 7 teams after the early round robin and running a second such competition with 6 rounds, taking the top two teams?

so no seeding..no byes...no reward for year long bridge performance in the regular season?

Add on top of the general usa hatred for round robin formats

[matmat]

mike777, on Aug 16 2007, 09:58 PM, said:

matmat, on Aug 16 2007, 09:56 PM, said:

i don't really see why you need knockouts... what's wrong with taking the top 7 teams after the early round robin and running a second such competition with 6 rounds, taking the top two teams?

so no seeding..no byes...no reward for year long bridge performance in the regular season?

Add on top of the general usa hatred for round robin formats

yeah... and knockouts are great b/c if the best team has one bad session, they can no longer represent the federation. yeah. that's wonderful.

[JanM]

mike777, on Aug 16 2007, 08:17 PM, said:

If 2 or 20 nobody or seminobody teams only show up for usa2 trials this sounds like a great thing for bridge. The pros and sponsors are too busy with busy lives so why veto the rest of us..oh well....The highest goal is not for usa2 to be the best team..or the team that can win.

Well, if the best teams don't show up it's impossible for the winner to be the best team , which is one of the reasons not to hold an extra event. Our primary goal is still to select the two best teams to represent the US in the Bermuda Bowl.

[mike777]

JanM, on Aug 16 2007, 10:22 PM, said:

mike777, on Aug 16 2007, 08:17 PM, said:

If 2 or 20 nobody or seminobody teams only show up for usa2 trials this sounds like a great thing for bridge. The pros and sponsors are too busy with busy lives so why veto the rest of us..oh well....The highest goal is not for usa2 to be the best team..or the team that can win.

Well, if the best teams don't show up it's impossible for the winner to be the best team , which is one of the reasons not to hold an extra event. Our primary goal is still to select the two best teams to represent the US in the Bermuda Bowl.

Ya...I strongly disagree with that being the highest priority but agree it is in most countries. Selecting the best team or team with best chance to win.

As noted before you need to spell out what the rank of goals are in selecting a team. If the top goal is a level playing field..reward, regular season performance and let the chips fall...that is a very different top goal..than best team win.

[Cascade]

I think the best format would be based on a round-robin. This eliminates at least two problems with knockouts:

1. When you start a new round you throw away all of the information you have already gathered (except which team won the previous knockout matches). This is even more of a problem when you are trying to find the second best team.

2. Knocking out half of the teams at each stage makes it relatively likely that the best team (or one of the best two teams) are knocked out at an 'early' stage. It is a myth that the best team wins and the best team could easily get knocked out in one of the earlier rounds.

A compromise method that I have used in the past is successive round-robins where a relatively small number of teams are eliminated at each stage. This makes it less likely that the best team(s) are eliminated early. You can also carry forward the results from one round-robin to the next. Perhaps you might weight the scores e.g. 100% of the scores against other qualifiers and 50% of the scores against non-qualifiers or some other weighting.

A format for 25 teams might look like the following (with many details to be added):

Days 1 and 2 : Round-Robin 25 teams 6-board matches - five teams to be eliminated

Days 3 and 4 : Round-Robin 20 teams 8-board matches - four teams to be eliminated

Days 5 and 6 : Round-Robin 16 teams 10-board matches - four teams to be eliminated

Days 7 and 8 : Round-Robin 12 teams 12-board matches - four teams to be eliminated

Days 9 and 10 : Round-Robin 8 teams 20-board matches - four teams to be eliminated

Days 11 and 12 : Round-Robin 4 teams 48-board matches - two teams to be eliminated

[Gerben42]

If you can tell me what the bye structure will look like I can try and figure out a working double elimination model for this. Since there are 2 more rounds after determining USA1 this can be 90-board matches to be finished in at most 3 days.

I kinda like this Round Robin model also (with carryover to the next round). This is similar to the Polish method, except that they use pair qualification.

[awm]

I like Cascade's suggestion. This seems to remove "luck of the draw" in terms of who plays whom when, which is one of the problems with a KO-like structure. It also allows the selection of two teams without substantially increasing the number of days in the event, and it gives teams that might be better than their seeding points would indicate a chance to go deep in the event (i.e. they won't have to play the Nickell team in an elimination match early on). I'd suggest that IMP scores carry-over from day to day whereas victory point totals do not, which prevents a team which is sure to be eliminated from throwing a late round-robin match to help their friends in later days.

[hrothgar]

The more that I look at the cascading RR format that Wayne suggests, the more that I like it. (BTW, I think that "Cascade" would be a obvious choice of nomenclature)

My primary concern is the relatively short duration of the matches during the final rounds of the event. By this stage in the process, the last teams should be closely matched in terms of strength. You'll want long matches to ensure statistically significant results. My gut says that adding an additional day to the trial and increasing the length of these matches to 72 boards would have a signficant impact on the final results.

In addition, if we turn to the early events in the cascade, theres NO way that we could create a fully meshed round robin. We'd need to determine if it was better to 5 fully meshed RR's with 5 teams OR run a single Swiss with 25 teams (eliminating the bottom 5). I think that there might be some significant advantages to using the Swiss format with the Strength of Schedule adjustment that Gerben and Alex developed for the Aussies. (The SoS metric compensates for the lack of a complete mesh and doesn't require any assumptions about seeding)

[JanM]

I've suggested more Round Robins a few times when we have been discussing the USBC format. As someone mentioned above, it hasn't been a popular suggestion among US players. The main objection raised is that, particularly with a mild cut, there is too much opportunity for "sportsmanslike" dumping - a situation where it is to one team's advantage to lose to a "bad" team in order to eliminate a "good" team.

IMP carryover prevents this to some extent of course, but IMP carryover also has flaws - it means that sometimes your goals are uncertain - should you go all out to win a match, knowing that you might end up losing lots of IMPs and thus being eliminated from the event when you might not have been eliminated had you just played down the middle? Should you "look ahead," trying to build up IMPs against a team you are pretty sure will advance, even if that might change which other teams advance? That's a basic problem with Round Robins, of course - in a KO match, your goal is clear: beat the team against whom you are playing. In a Round Robin, sometimes both your fate and your goal depends on what other teams are doing.

Another flaw, and one that I know many people on the drafting committee consider overwhelming, is that sometimes a team that has already been eliminated has an effect on which team(s) advance. That's an uncomfortable position for the "eliminated" team (I know, having once been in that situation), as well as making the teams still fighting for a place feel awkward.

Another problem with Round Robins that is less obvious is that not everyone plays the same field, because we have a significant number of sponsored teams, where the team is of varying quality depending on when the sponsor plays. That leads to some luck in a KO (whether the sponsor plays when boards are "swingy," but much more in a Round Robin. We try to mitigate the problem to some exent by requiring blind lineup submissions for the Round Robin - teams have to submit their lineups before knowing what team they are playing the match against - but that is less effective with fewer teams in the Round Robin.

[mycroft]

Two things I think are needed:
- The chance of the best team getting an unlucky session and being knocked out early, knowing that they can catch up in the next 48 boards.
- Stamina, and the ability to win after a week/10 days of strenuous bridge, is required to be proven.

The best thing, of course, is to mirror the coniditions they are going to find when they win - after all, we want the team that can best play in the conditions of the World Championship. We can't do that, we know that, but we can come as close as meets the requirement of having a good experience for the dead money (yeah, that's a mean term, but there are lots of people who are dead money that are willing to pay the money for the fun of the tournament, even in Poker. I'd be one, frankly, especially if there was something to do after being knocked out).

I understand the seeding thoughts that the "big three" should be part of the process; they at least prove stamina. So, give the winners clear byes through the RRs. There's an incentive (I know this is how it used to be, but...) Give those who get close a chance through seeding in the RR, but they are going to have to prove their stamina just like everybody else.

I also believe there should be a distinct USA 1 and USA 2, but that's because I believe that USA2 should have to meet Canada and Mexico for a qualify two. Yes, I know that that would be status quo, but it solves four issues:
- First, it gives a distinct preference to be USA 1.
- Second, it improves the non-US Zone II players by giving them extra experience at the World Class Level.
- Third, if one day USA 2 comes last, that may be an incentive to improve the choosing process for USA 2 :-)
- Fourth, in the times where Zone II are only allowed two teams, we don't have the perception problem we had the last time (where the ACBL said "two USA teams, and the rest of the zone, TFL").

I realize that this whole last means nothing to you, Jan, as a representative of the USBF rather than the ACBL. I just figure I should get it out in the open.

[JanM]

mycroft, on Aug 17 2007, 12:42 PM, said:

I also believe there should be a distinct USA 1 and USA 2, but that's because I believe that USA2 should have to meet Canada and Mexico for a qualify two.  Yes, I know that that would be status quo, but it solves four issues:
- First, it gives a distinct preference to be USA 1.
- Second, it improves the non-US Zone II players by giving them extra experience at the World Class Level.
- Third, if one day USA 2 comes last, that may be an incentive to improve the choosing process for USA 2 :-)
- Fourth, in the times where Zone II are only allowed two teams, we don't have the perception problem we had the last time (where the ACBL said "two USA teams, and the rest of the zone, TFL").

I realize that this whole last means nothing to you, Jan, as a representative of the USBF rather than the ACBL.  I just figure I should get it out in the open.

There are 2 Zone 2 representatives only if not enough teams finish in the top half in the Olympiad. If the US team doesn't finish in the top half in the Olympiad, the US gets 1 team and Canada & Mexico get one team (or at least I think that's what happens; I don't know because the US team has always finished in the top half in the Olympiad). If neither Canada nor Mexico finishes in the top half, the US gets 2 teams and Canada & Mexico get none. That's a WBF rule (and incidentally has always been waived for Canada/Mexico).

I don't think that I'm being US-centric (or whatever the word should be) to believe that the USA2 team shouldn't have to play in an additional Playoff. For one thing, the team allocation is made by WBF. I'd be more than happy to have a Zonal selection process where all 3 countries competed for our 3 teams. But WBF doesn't allow that (and I do understand the reasons, before all you Canadians come down on me ). For another, it's already very difficult to win the chance to represent the US; I don't think it would be reasonable to make it even more so.

[pclayton]

Quote

We can't do that, we know that, but we can come as close as meets the requirement of having a good experience for the dead money (yeah, that's a mean term, but there are lots of people who are dead money that are willing to pay the money for the fun of the tournament, even in Poker. I'd be one, frankly, especially if there was something to do after being knocked out).

Today's dead money is tomorrow's USA1 and USA2 team.

[han]

Here is my suggestion for the knockout phase with 8 teams remaining. After the first four matches you have 4 winners and 4 losers which get a second chance.

The 4 winning teams play among themselves, two teams going to the winners finals and two teams going to the consolation SF. The 4 first-round losers also play for 2 places in the consolation SF.

Then, the four teams in the consolation SF play for a chance to play against the winners of the winners final and become USA 2.

USA 1 will have won all matches. USA 2 will have won all matches but 1. The other 6 teams will have lost 2 matches, once a team gets to this final stage it always gets a second chance.

It is possible that two teams play eachother twice, you could have a carry-over.

[cherdano]

All the suggestions need to take byes into account. Last time there was one bye to the semifinals and one to the round of 8, but that may change depending on how many seeding points the top 2/3 teams earn (maybe Jan can correct that).

[han]

Well, my idea can easily adjusted when there are byes. It is just a knock-out with a consolation event where all the losers at any stage of the main event land in the consolation which plays for the USA 2 team. The later you get knocked out in the main event, the later you appear in the consolation event.

[JanM]

A "double elimination" KO has some issues to be resolved.
First, should it start, as Hannie suggests, with the Round of 8 losers, or with the Round of 16 losers?
Second, as Arend points out, there are often teams with byes. We never know until after the Vanderbilt how many byes there will be, and there has been some discussion of making it harder to get a semi-final bye in a 2-team year, but I'm guessing that there will be 2 or 3 Round of 8 byes (2 of which might in fact be one semi-final bye).
Third, how long should the matches be? If you follow Hannie's "format," USA2 will have 4 teams when the USA1 finals starts. Those 4 need to reduce to 1 to play the losing finalist. So do they play matches that are half as long as the USA1 finals? Or does the losing finalist get a day of rest while they finish? (that would still involve shorter USA2 matches).
I suspect that the conclusion you're all reaching - that a double elimination KO is the right solution - is right, and so then we have to resolve the non-trivial problems that involves.

[TimG]

JanM, on Aug 17 2007, 03:51 PM, said:

A "double elimination" KO has some issues to be resolved.
First, should it start, as Hannie suggests, with the Round of 8 losers, or with the Round of 16 losers?
Second, as Arend points out, there are often teams with byes. We never know until after the Vanderbilt how many byes there will be, and there has been some discussion of making it harder to get a semi-final bye in a 2-team year, but I'm guessing that there will be 2 or 3 Round of 8 byes (2 of which might in fact be one semi-final bye).
Third, how long should the matches be? If you follow Hannie's "format," USA2 will have 4 teams when the USA1 finals starts. Those 4 need to reduce to 1 to play the losing finalist. So do they play matches that are half as long as the USA1 finals? Or does the losing finalist get a day of rest while they finish? (that would still involve shorter USA2 matches).
I suspect that the conclusion you're all reaching - that a double elimination KO is the right solution - is right, and so then we have to resolve the non-trivial problems that involves.

I don't imagine this matters much in the attempt to determine the two best teams. But, it will make a difference in how long most teams will play, so is more of an organizational matter than a competitive matter. I would tend to think that teams that have spent the time and money to enter the event would want to play as long as possible, so you would want to have a USA2 bracket created sooner rather than later.

Quote

Second, as Arend points out, there are often teams with byes. We never know until after the Vanderbilt how many byes there will be, and there has been some discussion of making it harder to get a semi-final bye in a 2-team year, but I'm guessing that there will be 2 or 3 Round of 8 byes (2 of which might in fact be one semi-final bye).

Byes don't seem too difficult to accommodate. If you are willing to fill out the uSA2 bracket with some teams from the round robin that did not qualify for the winners' bracket, the matter is trivial. I posted the specifics earlier today -- the problem of three byes to the round of 8 (which I did not consider earlier) is taken care of by qualifying 10 teams to the USA1 bracket and 6 to the USA2 bracket.

Quote

Third, how long should the matches be?

There are two competing considerations here: matches should be long enough to produce significant results; and matches should be short enough to be organizationally practical.

My guess is that the difference between a 90 board match (6 x 16) and a 128 board match (8 x 16) is not significant (and that both are probably too short to reliably determine the stronger team). I bet those statisticians that have studied this would be happy to speak up.

If you start the KO phase with the round of 16, you need four rounds to determine USA1 and two additional rounds to determine USA2. That's six KO rounds, if you use 90 board (day and a half) matches, that's nine days of KOs. Another 3 days for the round robin means a 12 day event. But, the main event (USA1) will be done in 9 days, with the playoff for USA2 requiring three extra days. The event could be shortened by 1/2 a day by playing 64 board matches in the round of 16; or by a full day by playing 64 board matches in the rounds of 16 and 8.

Quote

If you follow Hannie's "format," USA2 will have 4 teams when the USA1 finals starts. Those 4 need to reduce to 1 to play the losing finalist. So do they play matches that are half as long as the USA1 finals? Or does the losing finalist get a day of rest while they finish? (that would still involve shorter USA2 matches).

I think the thing to do is to have four teams remaining at the conclusion of the USA1 bracket: one losing finalist plus three teams with one loss from the USA2 bracket. Then you have four teams playing off for USA2. This means you won't have to adjust the match lengths or deal with a team having time off.

At first glance, it might seem that the losing finalist should not be treated the same as the one-loss teams from the USA2 bracket, after all they reached the finals. But, some of those other one-loss teams may also have lost only to the USA1 winners. The losing finalist could be allowed to pick their opponents in the first playoff round as something of a reward for having made it to the USA1 finals.