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

[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.