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Topic: 2013 World Championship Format (Read 31152 times) |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #135 on: Jul 16th, 2012, 5:56pm » |
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Sorry for the long haitus. My current thinking on format is:
1) $10 (1000 Arimaa points) entry fee.
2) One round per week, with a one-week break after six rounds.
3) Everyone plays six rounds.
4) Paired like FTE except those who have three or more losses can't be paired against those with two or fewer losses.
5) Seventh round to the conclusion is straight FTE, with losses, pairing history, etc., carried forward from the first six rounds.
6) Places after first decided by wins (not counting byes) with performance rating as a tiebreaker.
7) Prize money proportional to 1/rank for everyone who makes the finals.
8) $5 of the entry fee is divided between volunteer game referees, commentators, etc. The other $5 goes to the prize fund. Both the volunteer fund and the prize fund can be expanded by donations.
Any comments on the basic structure?
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| « Last Edit: Jul 16th, 2012, 5:57pm by Fritzlein » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #136 on: Jul 18th, 2012, 1:53am » |
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Another thought
9) Seeding by WHRE if at least six games. Otherwise by relative WHRH, then by relative game room rating. By "relative WHRH", I mean take all entered players that have a WHRE rating and compare that to their WHRH. If they average X points higher on WHRH, then any player who doesn't have a WHRE rating uses WHRH minus X points instead of straight WHRH. This mitigates the two ratings being on a different scale.
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ChrisB
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #137 on: Jul 18th, 2012, 2:22am » |
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Thanks for the outline Fritz. I have a few comments, mostly related to encouraging more people to enter. But if my comments add problems or complications, I'm fine with everything as you outlined.
on Jul 16th, 2012, 5:56pm, Fritzlein wrote:Sorry for the long haitus. My current thinking on format is:
1) $10 (1000 Arimaa points) entry fee. |
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Looks good to me. This relatively low fee should enable more people to participate.
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2) One round per week, with a one-week break after six rounds.
3) Everyone plays six rounds. |
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Six rounds for all seems good to me. However, instead of a one-week break after six rounds, I would prefer that players have the option to take a free bye during one of the first six weeks and then play their 6th game during week seven. This could come in handy for those with deadlines, exams, vacations, etc. In fact, a second free bye for those making the finals may be desirable. To help prevent one from using the free bye to gain a strategic advantage (for example, avoiding a difficult opponent or, when three players remain, forcing the other two to play), we could require that the bye be declared several weeks in advance.
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4) Paired like FTE except those who have three or more losses can't be paired against those with two or fewer losses. |
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Does this mean that the pairing will be folding (that is, top-seeded plays bottom-seeded in Round 1) rather than sliding (that is, top-seeded plays middle-seeded and next middle-seeded plays bottom-seeded in Round 1)? To reduce the number of gross mismatches and thereby encourage more people to enter, I would prefer a sliding pairing for the first six rounds.
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5) Seventh round to the conclusion is straight FTE, with losses, pairing history, etc., carried forward from the first six rounds.
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This seems fair to me. (Just as a side note: it looks like about two-thirds of the finalists will start with two losses and that up to one-half of the finalists could be eliminated in round 7)
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6) Places after first decided by wins (not counting byes) with performance rating as a tiebreaker.
7) Prize money proportional to 1/rank for everyone who makes the finals.
8) $5 of the entry fee is divided between volunteer game referees, commentators, etc. The other $5 goes to the prize fund. Both the volunteer fund and the prize fund can be expanded by donations.
Any comments on the basic structure? |
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For what it's worth from one not likely to make the finals, ha ha, items 6) through 8) all look good to me.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #138 on: Jul 18th, 2012, 11:02am » |
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on Jul 18th, 2012, 2:22am, ChrisB wrote:| Thanks for the outline Fritz. I have a few comments |
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Thanks for the feedback!
Quote:| Six rounds for all seems good to me. However, instead of a one-week break after six rounds, I would prefer that players have the option to take a free bye during one of the first six weeks and then play their 6th game during week seven. This could come in handy for those with deadlines, exams, vacations, etc. In fact, a second free bye for those making the finals may be desirable. To help prevent one from using the free bye to gain a strategic advantage (for example, avoiding a difficult opponent or, when three players remain, forcing the other two to play), we could require that the bye be declared several weeks in advance. |
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As a player, the thought of being able to have a rest week of my own choosing is enormously attractive. There may be a week which I know in advanced is nearly a forced forfeit because I am travelling and/or busy. Even if I get a game scheduled at a "good" time, say at 5:00 a.m. on a work day because my weekend is unavailable, it is a semi-forfeit due to fatigue.
As an administrator, however, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to give players a bye week of their choosing. Depending on the pairing scheme the pairings are at least partially predictable and therefore subject to manipulation even if byes are requested in advance. For starters, the top two seeds could collude to avoid each other in the preliminaries by coordinating to request byes in the sixth and seventh weeks respectively. And then what happens in the seventh week when everyone "must play" due to having earlier requested a bye, but there are an odd number? Then someone gets a second bye, making it strategic to request an earlier bye even if you don't need one.
Of course people would try to use their bye(s) strategically. How confident can we be that this won't mess up the tournament dynamics? I haven't thought through all the consequences, but my gut instinct is that we don't want to risk opening this can of worms, especially when the established way of playing every week has proved to be at least tolerable.
Quote:| Does this mean that the pairing will be folding (that is, top-seeded plays bottom-seeded in Round 1) rather than sliding (that is, top-seeded plays middle-seeded and next middle-seeded plays bottom-seeded in Round 1)? To reduce the number of gross mismatches and thereby encourage more people to enter, I would prefer a sliding pairing for the first six rounds. |
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Ahhh, excellent suggestion. It hadn't occurred to me to use a different pairing algorithm before and after the break, but why not? The reason I wanted to get away from Swiss pairings as used in past years in the Open Classic is that it created several different types of situations with an incentive for someone to lose on purpose:
* Someone who is already eliminated with three losses might purposely lose as a favor to someone with only two losses.
* Someone who is guaranteed a spot in the final might purposely lose to change their own seed, manipulating their pairings in the finals.
* Someone who is guaranteed a spot in the final might purposely lose to elevate their opponent into the top eight, knocking someone they fear more out of the top eight.
But all of these incentives disappear when we carry losses forward, when the finals aren't limited to eight, and when we forbid people who have three or more losses from playing people who don't. Therefore the Swiss pairing of past Open Classic tournaments could be used again with slight modification for the first six rounds, while FTE pairing could kick in for round seven and beyond. I rather like this idea, and I am leaning towards it for the reasons you suggest. Sliding pairing would make the preliminaries a bit more friendly while folding pairing keeps the finals more cutthroat.
Quote:| Just as a side note: it looks like about two-thirds of the finalists will start with two losses and that up to one-half of the finalists could be eliminated in round 7 |
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Yep. As I think about it more, I rather like the idea of limiting prize money to those who make it to round seven, even if half of them get eliminated the very next round. That will add weight to the idea of "making the cut". There will be additional psychological separation between the preliminaries and the finals, even though (because losses are carried forward) it is in essence one big tournament. There are very few people with a realistic chance of winning the World Championship, but there are quite a few who have a realistic shot at "finishing in the money", which gives a larger population of folks something to shoot for.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 18th, 2012, 11:07am by Fritzlein » |
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Nombril
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #139 on: Jul 18th, 2012, 4:40pm » |
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on Jul 18th, 2012, 11:02am, Fritzlein wrote:| Yep. As I think about it more, I rather like the idea of limiting prize money to those who make it to round seven, even if half of them get eliminated the very next round. That will add weight to the idea of "making the cut". There will be additional psychological separation between the preliminaries and the finals, even though (because losses are carried forward) it is in essence one big tournament. There are very few people with a realistic chance of winning the World Championship, but there are quite a few who have a realistic shot at "finishing in the money", which gives a larger population of folks something to shoot for. |
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I like this, one of the parts of a split format I like is the prestige of making the cut - and this brings that idea into the unified format!
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Adanac
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #140 on: Jul 19th, 2012, 11:13am » |
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I'd be happy to use this system in the upcoming WC.
I didn't see the time control mentioned, but I'd prefer 90s per move. The opening round games will be short regardless of the time control, but after week six I think it's important to have reasonably slow time controls. Anything less than 90s/move would probably reduce the quality of play.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #141 on: Jul 19th, 2012, 1:03pm » |
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on Jul 19th, 2012, 11:13am, Adanac wrote:| I didn't see the time control mentioned, but I'd prefer 90s per move. The opening round games will be short regardless of the time control, but after week six I think it's important to have reasonably slow time controls. Anything less than 90s/move would probably reduce the quality of play. |
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Oops, I forgot to mention time control. Thanks for bringing it up. The survey consensus was pretty clearly for 60s/move for the earliest games, in particular a large majority rejected the notion that all games should be played at 90s/move or slower. For the slowest games the consensus was less clear, because 120s/move got only a bare majority. I will interpret this to mean 120s/move is appropriate only for the finals of the finals. To be more specific I propose the time control
For the first six rounds: 60s/5m/100/0/4h/4m
Starting in round seven: 90s/5m/100/0/6h/5m
When only three or two players remain: 120s/5m/75/0/8h/6m
The most important number is time increment per move (60s-90s-120s). The progression is justified by the increasing seriousness of the games. 60s at the start may seem low, but it reduces the burden on top players that a long tournament naturally imposes. Rather than seeding any players straight into the finals, we put everyone on a nearly-equal footing, but at least we don't drag out the early games where the top players can expect blowout wins.
Second-most important is max time per move (4m-5m-6m). I justify the increase only because I expect an increased number of commentators at the end. It can be boring to wait a whole six minutes for a move and very difficult to talk about it that long as a commentator. That thought might induce me to keep the cap at five minutes. However, for the very final games I hope we have at least three commentators who can fill up the time, entertain the spectators, and sustain the sense of excitement and tension. As a player who can't hear the commentary, I wouldn't like waiting a whole six minutes in silence, but I think the annoyance to the waiting player can be justified if the lengthened maximum time is conducive to the highest possible quality of play, which is what we want from the championship game(s).
Not very important but perhaps controversial will be my proposed banked time percentage (100-100-75). The slight discount on banked time in the finals is intended to discourage blitz moves. For the sake of the spectators, there should at least be time for the commentators to say why necessary moves are necessary. Also for the sake of high-quality play, the players should be encouraged to take a few extra seconds to double-check even obvious moves. Finally, even if player behavior is not influenced at all, the discount should slightly reduce the total game length, so that the 120s/move games aren't actually a full third longer than 90s/move games.
I think 75% banking for the championship game(s) is a good idea, but it doesn't really matter. I doubt anyone, whether player or spectator, can point to a game in either 2011 or 2012 where it made a difference one way or the other, even though the time controls were different between the years. We could argue, but we'd be arguing more on principle than practicality. Just let me have my way on this and see what happens. 
Other than the one place in which 75 != 100, I believe my proposed time controls are completely in line with the consensus desires of the Arimaa community, both as players and as spectators. That is to say that, except in a minor detail, I don't think I am imposing my will so much as implementing the closest thing possible to what everyone else wants.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 19th, 2012, 1:04pm by Fritzlein » |
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aaaa
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #142 on: Jul 26th, 2012, 1:55pm » |
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I'm having serious misgivings about how, given their conflicting aims, elimination- and Swiss-style rules are being mixed in the way it's currently being discussed. On the one hand, rules typical for Swiss tournaments, particularly slide pairing and the fact that an as "unpromising" player as possible gets the bye, exist to contribute towards a fair strength of schedule and consequent ranking for everyone at the end of the tournament and are thus only appropriate under the premise that everyone gets there in the first place. On the other hand, (floating tuple) elimination tournaments are cutthroat by their very nature; too many losses and you're out. Thus, byes and lesser valued opponents are things you earn by having a good seed and how well you performed in the tournament, which translates into fold pairing and a bye policy that is inverted in comparison to that of a Swiss-style tournament.
So, keeping above in mind, a "sanitized" version of the latest proposal would be to keep the existing FTE tournament structure and add a partially parallel-running Swiss tournament in which eliminated players would flow into and which would end after the sixth round of the main tournament. The Swiss tournament would remain linked to the FTE insofar the scheduling of the former would be affected by the games in the latter, but not vice versa. However, how the final ranking is to be calculated must be chosen meticulously, lest it's unfairly influenced by the various peculiarities arising from such a hybrid approach, especially ones related to byes.
I also wouldn't like to see mistre's proposal concerning podium places be dropped. We want to avoid a repeat of a playoff game being played anyway on an ad hoc basis because people were clamoring for one.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #143 on: Jul 26th, 2012, 11:41pm » |
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I don't feel strongly about the method of settling places behind first. Since you and mistre are voting for the same thing, let me see if I can formalize it, and if there are no objections, that can become official.
Ranking: First place goes to the only player with fewer than three losses. Other players are ranked in order of wins, not counting byes. If there is a tie for second place by number of wins, the top two of those by performance rating will play a single playoff game, with the winner taking second place and the loser taking third place. If second place is unambiguous, but two or more players are tied for third place, the top two of those by performance rating will play a single playoff game, with the winner taking third place and the loser taking fourth place. Thus, at most one playoff game will take place in the tournament; all ranks not directly determined by the playoff game will be in order of wins, then in order of performance rating including the playoff game.
I also don't feel strongly about the difference between Swiss pairing both above and below the elimination line, or FTE above and Swiss below. I'm willing to go with your preference for the latter, unless anyone else thinks of some reason we shouldn't.
By the way, have you thought more about my proposal to have the in-tournament performance calculated according to very weak priors of pre-tournament rating rather than according to moderate priors of everyone being equal?
I believe that one problem with equal priors is that in a big tournament it takes more rounds before there are enough connections between players to start sorting players with equal records. After two rounds of a 64-player FTE that is true to seed, there will be sixteen 0-2 players who have no distinction, and similarly sixteen 2-0 players. Even in a more realistic scenario including upsets, there will be a large handful of players in groups with no distinction.
If we get into a situation with no in-tournament distinction, then we can't reward someone who got a tougher early pairing with an easier later pairing. Similarly, we can't punish someone who got an easy early pairing with a tougher later pairing. Our "even-up" pairing wouldn't kick in until later rounds, which is especially problematic if we are switching to the "even-up" rule that the top player in a score group plays down and a bottom player in a score group plays up, rather than the reverse as we have done in the past.
The idea of using pre-tournament ratings for weak priors is that it would immediately distinguish between a tougher pairing and an easier one, and allow immediate application of rewards. But I'm not sure how it would work out in practice; one would have to run some simulations to get a reasonable feel for it. What do you think?
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qswanger
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #144 on: Aug 3rd, 2012, 3:09pm » |
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I'm a little late to this discussion (but I did briefly skim the preceeding 10 pages and hope to go back through them more thoroughly later), so my apologies if something similar has already been made to what I'm about to suggest:
I kinda like the idea of having an Arimaa world champion determined by a cycle similar to the old FIDE World Chess Championship; i.e., Qualifying "interzonal" tournaments that *could* be open to everyone; "candidate" matches that would follow that; and then a larger World Championship final between the reigning world champion and the survivor of the candidate matches -- "the challenger". I think this would previde for quite a lot of drama. And perhaps it would be more practical to space out all of this over two years instead of every year as we have currently.
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| « Last Edit: Aug 3rd, 2012, 3:11pm by qswanger » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #145 on: Aug 4th, 2012, 6:42pm » |
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on Aug 3rd, 2012, 3:09pm, qswanger wrote:| I kinda like the idea of having an Arimaa world champion determined by a cycle similar to the old FIDE World Chess Championship; i.e., Qualifying "interzonal" tournaments that *could* be open to everyone; "candidate" matches that would follow that; and then a larger World Championship final between the reigning world champion and the survivor of the candidate matches -- "the challenger". I think this would previde for quite a lot of drama. And perhaps it would be more practical to space out all of this over two years instead of every year as we have currently. |
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Thanks for the feedback, qswanger. We gave you quite a lot to read through, so I commend your perseverance! You are not the only one nostalgic for the old World Championships of chess; Adanac too has fond memories of past drama. He and I discussed the relative merits in another thread. To spare you having to read through even more old posts, let me try to summarize my side of the argument here.
The only part of the old FIDE system that appeals to me is the drama of a long head-to-head match between two rivals for the title. The rest of the system strikes me as archaic.
First, why should qualifying tournaments be zonal a.k.a. regional a.k.a. geographically determined? For a game played in physical space, sure, it keeps costs down to have the first round of eliminations be local. It would be way too expensive to force everyone to gather in a single place for one big tournament. But on the Internet it makes no sense to enforce geographical distinctions, especially since it is difficult to be sure where anyone is physically located anyway. I don't see the benefit of zonals for an Internet-based tournament.
Second, the long knockout matches that were part of the FIDE cycle for a while make things highly dependent on seeding and on particular pairings. What if there is some fluke of seeding so that the #2 player in the world gets paired against the #1 player in the world early in elimination rounds? (For us that could easily have happened with hanzack and chessandgo in 2012 thanks to hanzack's suppressed rating.) Then the finals could be anti-climactic instead of being the peak of drama. The way that Arimaa's FTE format avoids repeat pairings until the end strikes me as much fairer and much more likely to result in the top players surviving until the climatic finish. Again, the FIDE way of doing things was an artifact of costs in physical space: it is much cheaper to get two players together to duke it out for many games than it is to re-pair everyone after every game.
Third, the floating elimination format we have adopted is very efficient. If you want a FIDE-style tournament, and you want it to be open to everyone, and you want it to have the same high probability of crowning the best player that floating elimination has, then the FIDE-style tournament is going to take longer to finish, period. This is an artifact of wiping away losses between stages in the FIDE-style tournament rather than preserving losses in floating elimination.
Finally, regardless of how qualifying is done, even the drama of the reigning World Champion defending his title against a challenger is a benefit that comes at the price of unfairness. Imagine that there are five top players of essentially equal skill. Why should the old World Champion have a 1/2 chance to become the new World Champion while four players who are just as good as he is only have a 1/8 chance each? Whoever is lucky enough to win one year is has a huge leg up the next year, which to me seems too high a price to pay in order to preserve the champ/challenger storyline.
My opinion, in short, is that the Internet gives us the opportunity to do much better than the old FIDE format; the main point in favor of the latter is nostalgia rather than fairness or efficiency.
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| « Last Edit: Aug 4th, 2012, 6:59pm by Fritzlein » |
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clyring
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #146 on: Aug 4th, 2012, 9:00pm » |
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With the ease of performing ratings calculations nowadays (which tend to be much more accurate when fed new data regularly than any reasonable tournament format), the main reasons to even bother having a tournament to decide who gets the title are drama and tradition. (Perhaps a third reason might be that it is easier to understand how the tournament was won than how ratings are determined.)
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #147 on: Aug 4th, 2012, 9:47pm » |
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on Aug 4th, 2012, 9:00pm, clyring wrote:| With the ease of performing ratings calculations nowadays (which tend to be much more accurate when fed new data regularly than any reasonable tournament format), the main reasons to even bother having a tournament to decide who gets the title are drama and tradition. (Perhaps a third reason might be that it is easier to understand how the tournament was won than how ratings are determined.) |
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Ratings calculations are indeed more accurate than tournament results, but ratings are also far easier to manipulate than elimination-format tournaments. If chess (or Arimaa) were to abandon the tournament tradition and crown a World Champion based on ratings alone, you would see rating manipulation on an unprecedented scale. I see on the latest FIDE list that Kramink at #3 is a distant 40 rating points behind Carlsen at #1. Yet what looks like a substantial gap could be trivially overcome if his fellow Russians (five of whom are in the top twenty) started losing to Kramnik intentionally in order to have a Russian be World Champion.
It is not just tradition and drama that dictate using a elimination tournament to crown a World Champion; it is also greater robustness to collusion and other forms of rating manipulation.
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| « Last Edit: Aug 5th, 2012, 12:37pm by Fritzlein » |
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aaaa
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #148 on: Aug 26th, 2012, 11:21am » |
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on Jul 26th, 2012, 11:41pm, Fritzlein wrote:By the way, have you thought more about my proposal to have the in-tournament performance calculated according to very weak priors of pre-tournament rating rather than according to moderate priors of everyone being equal?
I believe that one problem with equal priors is that in a big tournament it takes more rounds before there are enough connections between players to start sorting players with equal records. After two rounds of a 64-player FTE that is true to seed, there will be sixteen 0-2 players who have no distinction, and similarly sixteen 2-0 players. Even in a more realistic scenario including upsets, there will be a large handful of players in groups with no distinction.
If we get into a situation with no in-tournament distinction, then we can't reward someone who got a tougher early pairing with an easier later pairing. Similarly, we can't punish someone who got an easy early pairing with a tougher later pairing. Our "even-up" pairing wouldn't kick in until later rounds, which is especially problematic if we are switching to the "even-up" rule that the top player in a score group plays down and a bottom player in a score group plays up, rather than the reverse as we have done in the past.
The idea of using pre-tournament ratings for weak priors is that it would immediately distinguish between a tougher pairing and an easier one, and allow immediate application of rewards. But I'm not sure how it would work out in practice; one would have to run some simulations to get a reasonable feel for it. What do you think? |
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Although the point you raise is a fair one, the reason I don't like this idea, is because it goes against the maxim of having a tournament be influenced as little and as predictably as possible by anything external. This I can only see be translated as the external source being on an ordinal scale and being used exclusively for tie-breaking purposes. Using any more information than that would lead to an uncomfortably fluid mechanism of a dynamic seeding process that is continuously operating during the scheduling of pairings and is very sensitive to the exact values for a whole set of parameters (prior and variance of the rating list plus the prior used in the tournament). This, while it's already very hard to label any particular choice of parameter as anything other than arbitrary.
Now admittedly, this objection is somewhat philosophical and subjective, but I think this is fundamentally a manifestation of under how much strain an elimination tournament with so few lives is operating under. 64 participants is likely just too much with only 3 lives per player. It might just be better to declare a maximum size for the FTE and reintroduce some sort of preliminary system for when the field happens to surpass this number.
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Nombril
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #149 on: Aug 26th, 2012, 8:31pm » |
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on Aug 4th, 2012, 6:42pm, Fritzlein wrote:| First, why should qualifying tournaments be zonal a.k.a. regional a.k.a. geographically determined? For a game played in physical space, sure, it keeps costs down to have the first round of eliminations be local. It would be way too expensive to force everyone to gather in a single place for one big tournament. But on the Internet it makes no sense to enforce geographical distinctions, especially since it is difficult to be sure where anyone is physically located anyway. I don't see the benefit of zonals for an Internet-based tournament. |
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on Aug 26th, 2012, 11:21am, aaaa wrote:| Now admittedly, this objection is somewhat philosophical and subjective, but I think this is fundamentally a manifestation of under how much strain an elimination tournament with so few lives is operating under. 64 participants is likely just too much with only 3 lives per player. It might just be better to declare a maximum size for the FTE and reintroduce some sort of preliminary system for when the field happens to surpass this number. |
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Something to consider for later years ... that I think ties both of these two points together:
If/when we reach the (possibly arbitrary) participation limit for a triple elimination FTE, lets provide a number of ways to qualify for the championship tournament. But lets not use geographical districts, instead we can increase the drama of various events during the year. Maybe one big "classic" tournament in the fall. And the winning AWL team can send some people. And the top performers in the postal mixer get invites. And the top rated WHR players. And a scholarship tournament, where the prize is a paid entry fee. And the top placers from last year. And... <insert other ideas here >
Hopefully there would be enough routes to get in that there isn't pressure to rig/cheat/manipulate etc to win at one of these. And if the "limit" for the FTE is high enough, hopefully we wouldn't argue too much about a fair way to divvy up the slot between the different qualifying methods.
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