On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 02:26:08PM -0400, Elliott C. Evans wrote: > > Marc H. wrote: > > > I think choosing any structure which allows the tie for a fractional > > win would help immensely. Although it would be annoying if a losing > > player forced the tie when the tied players had both decided they > > wanted to fight it out. > > The main problem is that this tends to take more time to determine > finalists. If the participants were up for it this would be OK, but > if somebody only has two hours to play there could be trouble. Hmmm...good point, it could. Or it could lead to either the option we chose this year, or the 3-player possibility you suggested. How about awarding fractional wins and having a fixed number of games to be played and a fixed win count cutoff to get into the finals? 1+ among 3 rounds of 2 tables would tend to give 2-6 finalists...although 6/8 players makes the preliminaries seem kind of silly. But with two more games to pick up another half point, taking ties in the first round might happen, and players winning extra games reduce the number of finalists. I'm not sure, but some structure like this could work. > Also, how do you determine who gets the medallion if there's a tie > in the finals game? Maybe do like the Icehouse tourney where we > compute a full-tournament score to break the tie? I'm tempted to suggest a best-of-N finals anyway. Martian Chess is a tight game among good players, which makes me suspect that seating position may be a large factor in success. I'm not sure how much of that is who plays before you, and how much of it is whether you play first or last. Has anybody looked at any statistics to see if there's any such factor? If there is, the finals structure in particular might want to be aware of it. Alternatively, you could have the tying players face off in a 2-player (or however many player) game. Still potentially lengthening the tournament, but one of the nice things about Martian Chess is that it accepts any number of players.
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