MOL notes

[msmemory_archive]

That went surprisingly well. I'm grateful as heck to rufinia, lisagw, and napoleons_mommy for just plain dealing with stuff when I started to feel drowned. For my first time, it was like being thrown in the deep end. Luckily, Jack and Ankara, stepping in for the absent outgoing champs, already knew what sort of tournies they wanted.

Next time, bring: one or two large sheets of paper, folded, for laying out bigger charts. A ruler or straightedge. A clipboard, or two. A magic marker. More (!) copies of qual forms (though I was canonized on the spot for having brought any at all). Prepare a couple sizes of round-robin matrices just in case and bring spare tally sheets. A table cloth. My own EZ-Up?

Comments

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

And the lists have an interesting quality to them: if you screw up, the fighters can be relied on in a pinch to bail you out. As long as enough of the fighters have been in the trenches long enough, they can sort of figure out how to doctor up most screw-ups so everyone will be reasonably happy.

[marysdress.livejournal.com]

So there I was... Boredom War and they hadn't arranged for an MoL. No problem, I can do this - except it was a double elim and I was still new enough that doing those on the fly wasn't intuitive. Arrive - Sebastian Nightwind. He doctored my deer-in-headlights situation just great.

So, what he said.

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

I find having a spare EZ-Up is always a good idea at events, because there is always a need for more shade or more dry(er) space.

[thorsbaby.livejournal.com]

Whenm they told me you were MOL I had no worries.

My faith is justified.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

It was fun! I had no idea before how one makes a round robin tourney work.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

I don't know how she did it, but there's a dead easy way to do it. Assign everyone a number, and pair them off against each other is any arbitrary fashion you like. So in round 1:

1 2 3 4 5 6 face off against

C B A 9 8 7 these (I counted in hex to keep the spacing right)

Now set player 1 in stone, so he always keeps his spot, and rotate everyone else around by 1:

Round 2

1 C 2 3 4 5 faces off against

B A 9 8 7 6

Round 3:

1 B C 2 3 4

A 9 8 7 6 5

etc.

This also makes it easy to set up the final fight, if you have some guess as to which that should be - you make them 1 & 2.

If you have an odd number of people, add a ghost and put him in the rotation, and everything works.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

What we did was pretty similar to that- everyone had a number (you were 8) and the form had every pairing listed... so we set up the first pairins (1-10, 2-9, 3-8, etc. and then we had a 12th person added in, so we had 11-12 added to that). And as we paired everyone up, we crossed that pairing off the list. Whihc meant a couple of frantic "Who has Vis/other figheter not fought yet???" moments, but it worked. Like a well oiled machine.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

That would work, but I'd be surprised if it were what I'd classify as well-oiled. I am pretty sure in such a scheme, as you got deeper into the tourney, you could make some early pairings in a round that you had to back out of, because the people left all fought each other already.

Now there is some slack there, if you don't care about everyone fighting in "every round". If you allow such gaps, then you don't have to worry about backing out of decisions, but just wait for the fights to complete and then continue on with the list-crossing-off procedure.

The extreme form of this would be a bearpitish version of a round-robin: 1 vs. 2, 1 vs. 3, 1 vs. 4, ..., 1 vs N, 2 vs 3, 2 vs. 4, etc. It would either suck or be glorious to be #1 in such a scheduling.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

There were a couple of time where I was holding a few cards where we needed another pair to come back so we could make new pairings. Somehow Federach got a little behind, so he had three or four fights left when almost everyone else had one or two.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

We should have worked the pairings so that people's fights were more evenly distributed. (Ah, hindsight!) At the end, there were a couple people who were done, and a couple who still had two fights left. It would have been fairer for everyone to have finished at about the same time.

I agree with Bunny and Ankara that we should have split the heavy list into two RR pools of six then let the two winners compete for best.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

Well, I've given you a method now for next time. A way to physically execute that is to put everyone's name on a card. Top card always stays on the top, after every round the second card goes to the bottom, and you pair the next round in the same layout as you paired the last round, and pick up the cards in the reverse order. (And you can prevent disasters by writing down your original ordering of cards. That way, if the cards get mixed up somehow, you can rebuild everything by just knowing what round it is.

I agree with Bunny and Ankara that we should have split the heavy list into two RR pools of six then let the two winners compete for best.

Maybe, but again, I'm not convinced. Notice that in our tourney we had 3 people with 2 losses. How to you pick who the "winner" of the pool with 2 top finishers in it is? They have to fight it out, but then they've had an extra fight from the guy in the other pool.

Furthermore, a point behind the round robin method is to cut down on the vagaries of chance, but splitting the tourney into two round robins reintroduces that. Unless you are going to seed the halves, fairly often you will end up with disparate pools, which personally, I think defeats the format's objectives. Even if you seed the halves, stylistic differences sometimes means that a person would get through one half easily where he has little chance in the other.

For what it is worth, though I think the crowd might have preferred a clear winner, I think the fighters were fairly content with the result - after all, the three of us could have always chosen to fight it out if we needed to know more.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

and pick up the cards in the reverse order.

It occurs to me I was being either ambiguous or that I incorrectly formulated this part. What I meant was that when you pick up the cards at the end of the round, you want them to be in the same order they were in at the start of the round, and then move the second card to the bottom. That gets you the changes I diagrammed in my earlier post.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

There is nothing you can't do.

Especially with the friends you have. :-)

[artisticphoenix.livejournal.com]

You were GREAT! Really. Fencers are usually responsible for our own selves and we were delighted that you would keep score for us. And with a smile and with that quiet confidence that you always have. You rocked.