Help me make more and better tournaments (OpenGotha Experiments)

I’m curious as to what you mean here — it seems to me that in a McMahon tournament, which is what most of us are using OpenGotha for, pairing and ranking necessarily revolve around one parameter, McMahon score. But for pairing the goal is to minimise the aggregate difference between the scores of paired players, whereas ranking just orders players according to score, with various criteria for breaking ties. They’re not really trying to achieve the same thing.

Could you give an example of what you mean by “inconsistent”? Or of a final ranking that you thought felt unfair?

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I think the most blatant example happened to me when a tournament organiser used “categories” during pairing of a McMahon tournament, but didn’t use them during the ranking. Or perhaps it was the other way around. I ended up being declared as the winner of the tournament, even though the second had defeated me during the tournament. After the tournament we discussed with the organiser, and indeed I would have been ranked second if they had used the same parameters. The “second” player had the same number of victories as me (and so the same McMahon score), had defeated me, and had a better SOS than me.

This is far from being the only example, but I must say I never wrote down the details of any weird ranking situation to be able to say exactly what the organiser did wrong.

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Ah, that does sound a bit…unconventional.

I’ve always felt that the Help files in OpenGotha would benefit from explaining not only what the various pairing options do, but also when and why you might use one over another. I don’t remember ever seeing discussion of this online, nor much in the way of guidance from the EGF nor in the (otherwise quite useful) BGA Organisers Handbook. I’m not sure how many experienced tournament directors frequent these forums but maybe there’s scope for a spin-off thread discussing recommended practice for running a McMahon draw, and appropriate settings in OpenGotha.

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Results are up. Turns out you can upload any html, which gives a lot of room for personalization.

Thank you @yebellz, @Feijoa, @teapoweredrobot and @benjito for your participation. Instead of continuing to add more games arbitrarily, I think it’d be a better idea to create a new tournament.

With all this information, I can now make scripts that do most of the work. Expect the next tournament soonish.

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Well, that was fun and sounds like you learned a lot.

Looks like we don’t get medals on our profile pages though? :disappointed_relieved:

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Yeah, unfortunately that is out of my hands :confused:. Trophies come from OGS itself, but since the internal logic of these tournaments is handled outside of the server, there is no system in place where OGS just automatically knows who won the tournament.

I wonder if there is a good way to allow trophies to be awarded though. One solution could be to give the option to the tournament director to say which players get what. I wonder what @anoek might think of that possibility.

Obviously, a malicious actor could find their way to exploit just about anything, and turn such a system into a trophy farm for whatever reason.

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For now, I’m coding it just for myself. I’m not yet confident enough to think my scripts should ever see the light of day.

That being said, I see what the problem is. You mentioned, for example, McMahon scores being ignored and such. OpenGotha (the program) is a bit convoluted, not so straightforward to use. What probably happened is that new users didn’t know how to choose the settings correctly (and I’ll include myself in the group I call “new users”).

However, I’m not intending to use that program directly. Mostly I just want to learn how the xml protocol works and, in theory, just bypass the program entirely.

As for Tournament formats, I have a few ideas. I wouldn’t wanna speak to soon, lest I jinx it :sweat_smile:, but Double Round-Robin was just one of them. Mostly formats that (as far as I know) are not supported by either OGS or OpenGotha.

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@Leira, good research/experiments with interesting discoveries.
Are you also going to update Github’s Documentation and FAQ on Open Gotha Tournaments?

Probably, yes. I do need to test things a bit further, before I can put together a coherent guide though.

However, I do not know very well how GitHub works. Someone would have to show me how to do it.

Good, I will help you with that.
If you like I can write the text (when you are finished testing), so that you only have to check / supervise it.