Oh, interesting. You’re right: even elimination tournaments award points. +1 for win, +0.5 for tie, +0 for loss, +1 for bye.
Trophies for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd are effectively awarded by sorting players by “eliminated,-points,-SOS,-SODOS”.
The winning finalist is the only one not eliminated, so comes first. Then it’s by points (etc.) in descending order.
Without draws, the losing finalist would be guaranteed mathematically to have more points than any other eliminated player, since they’ve participated in more rounds and lost the same number of games (or fewer).
Interesting indeed. Maybe you should get +1 point for a tie instead, so it operates just like a win or bye.
Or, to make it more fun, we could keep repeating the finals even more times, over and over, until the players have accumulated enough points to lock down their trophies.
By the way, in the API data, what’s the difference between “points” and “net points”?
Interesting indeed. Maybe you should get +1 point for a tie instead, so it operates just like a win or bye.
Maybe. I’m somewhat inclined to leave the points as they are, to keep it aligned with other tournaments (I think the bug can be fixed without changing that). EDIT: to be clear, I’m not sure you’re wrong; +1 point for “not losing” seems in-the-spirit of elimination tournaments.
By the way, in the API data, what’s the difference between “points” and “net points”?
I dont see any real problems with handling ties in elimation tourneys simply as +1 for both as those would still be incredibly rare. Tho i guess that handling them as +0.5 doesnt cause any concrete problems either as long as neither player gets elimated.
When its just +0.5, maybe there could be problem if there are 2 people remaining in the top bracket and they play multiple ties together, while the person waiting in the bottom bracket gets +1 for the byes and wins they have. If that goes on for few continous rounds until someone finally loses in the top bracket and drops down, then they beat the person who has been waiting in the bottom bracket, it might result in a situation where the player who had the most points wasnt the one who was playing in the final.
But that seems like super rare edge-case, espesially since most tournaments (including all the sitewide tourneys) use rulesets which do not allow ties. Maybe NZ rules will become more popular now once those are implemented correctly and people start creating more elimation tournaments with those rules, but realistically speaking it should be enough if ties are just handled as “not a loss” by the tournament system.
EDIT, or wait what happens with double elimation tourneys if the person winning the final match has gotten 3 ties along the way while the player who loses in the final match has reached there with clean sheet of wins and byes? Doesnt that mean that the person losing the final match still has 0.5 points more than the winner? Does that mess up things?
The winner is not eliminated, so they are still in 1st place, regardless of the points totals. It’s only 2nd place (etc) that are decided by points. See my comment above for details.
Getting into tourney handling here rather than jigo but it strikes me that the current system is basically a fudge to be able to award a bronze medal. In that, for any kind of elimination tournament the winner is obvious, the second place should be also (although it sounds like that’s not actually the case) but third and downwards is undetermined.
The usual solution is to have a third place play off but we don’t do that. Hence needing points.
I would suggest not bothering with points in elimination tournaments and either only awarding first and second trophies or have a play off for third place.
For Swiss and especially MacMahon it seems that answering this points business is more important and I suppose 0.5 for jigo is better than 1 in that case otherwise could it be possible for someone with 2 wins and a draw to tie/beat someone with 3 wins?
Surely only the winner of an elimination tournament really means anything. The second-best player in the tournament might have been eliminated in the first round by the eventual winner, in a simple knock-out tournament.
(Maybe I misunderstand how elimination tournaments work here, I only ever play in McMahon or Swiss tournaments.)
I suppose that is the question: what does it mean? By definition the winner of the tourney is the one who won the final but second place seems to be defined differently to “the one who lost in the final” and it’s rather something like “the one who seems to have done best overall, given all the matches they played in the tourney and who isn’t the winner”
I think that feels unexpected but maybe is more correct.
You’re right, 2nd place must mean something in single-elimination. I overstated. But luck plays a significant factor in when the winner eliminates each opponent, so it doesn’t determine unambiguously who played the 2nd strongest in the tournament. That’s what double-elimination is good for.
Anyway, focusing on jigo:
In single-elimination:
points/sos/sodos (with 0.5 for draws) seems reasonable for determining 2nd/3rd place.
I’m not sure if I understand how this proposal is meant to work.
In most cases (when there are no draws) the loser of the final will have n - 1 points (from winning all but the final), while the rest of the players (besides the winner) will have no more than n - 2 points. Here, “n” is the number of rounds.
If the half-points gained from draws counted towards determining second and third place, it would create a pathological incentive for two players to pre-arrange a few draws (in order to harvest some points), before playing out a serious game.
Another procedure for determining third place would be to have an additional game between the losers of the two semi-finals.
I personally prefer just assigning 2nd place in the traditional way (as done across many tournaments in various other sports), that is, the loser of the final is considered to be in second place.
To reduce the aspect of luck, tournaments for various other sports use some sort of seeding based on ratings and specifically arrange the seeds such that the top two seeds can only meet in the final.
You’ve convinced me. The simplest / most predictable model for participants is reverse order of elimination. That’s what I’ll implement.
@Feijoa, the simplest model is to take your suggestion (thanks!) of giving a full tournament point for draw, allowing the ranking/ordering to “just work”. From an API perspective, this means that for elimination tournaments: points will be +1 for a win, draw, or bye. net_points will continue to match all other tournaments (+1 for a win, +0.5 for a draw), as will the sos and sodos tie-breakers (since they are sums of net_points).
If you want to award a meaningful 2nd place and 3rd place, then elimination tournaments just seem inappropriate. Have a McMahon or Swiss tournament instead.
Sorry for awkward question. How does reverse order of elimination work for 3rd/4th place? Those players are eliminated at the same time. Or is it time-based in that if you drag out a losing semi final longer than the other semi final then you get third place over a slightly faster playing semi finalist?
Or is that where points come in after all (except now we have the problem yebellz mentioned!)
FYI, the losing finalist in a double-elimination tournament is now guaranteed to come 2nd, even if they had lots of draws along the way.
The mechanic is as stated above, that in elimination tournaments players receive +1 tournament point for a win, draw, or bye. This makes second place correct for double-elimination, and makes 2nd and 3rd place predictable and match naive expectations (even if “correct” is debatable) for single- and double-elimination.
This is NOT retroactive. Games that already finished as a draw will have only earned +0.5 points (but newly-completed drawn games in existing tournaments will get +1). It also only changes elimination tournaments.
Also, I noticed when I created a test tournament that the graph was wonky after a draw. I’ve fixed that as well. This IS retroactive for old tournaments since it was just a visual bug. You can see what draws look like now by visiting my test tournament. (Note that I ran that tournament BEFORE fixing the tournament points, so it has the wrong player in 2nd place.)
In case anyone here is an admin (or knows an admin!) in a group that likes New Zealand rules, thought I’d point out that groups can now configure their ladders to any ruleset. (This also sets the default ruleset for tournaments created in the group.)
Also, any group that changes over, please report back here, since I might be interested in joining your ladders :).
EDIT: In the meantime, I’ve created my own group; feel free to join: New Zealand Ladders
You might be wondering: what happens if there’s a draw in a ladder? The player that’s lower on the ladder gets moved up to (but not ahead of) the other player. For example, if Bob, who is 22nd in the ladder, challenges Alice, who is 15th, and they draw, then Bob will become 16th in the ladder and Alice will still be 15th.