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omar
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2013 World Championship Format
« on: Mar 22nd, 2012, 2:53pm » |
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I think we better start this discussion early so that if the community wants to help with organizing it, we have plenty of time to discuss and prepare.
I was very happy with how the 2012 WC went and would be willing to do it this way again. However, if the community also wants to be involved with organizing the event to allow more people to participate, I am open to that as well.
Although the high registration fee helped to keep the tournament small enough for me to manage, the method of prize distribution does have a little problem which I realized afterwards. If there had been a lot of contributions made to the WC prize fund then the high registration fee would not be enough to keep the tournament small. Even winning one game would have guaranteed a bigger return than the registration fee. Thus more people would have joined driving the prize fund even higher, lowering the average strength of the field and providing incentive for even more to join. So I have to change the method of prize distribution or limit the number of players that can enter. I like the prize distribution method and would be more inclined to limiting the number of players. If I have to run the tournament again in 2013, I will probably limit it to eight players with the players who contributed most to the prize fund and who contributed earlier having a higher priority of being in the tournament. Anyways that's what I would change for next year if I have to run the tournament again.
If the community is also willing to help with organizing the event then we can have a WC that allows more people to enter. We can go back to using something like the Open Swiss to determine who plays in the final WC tournament or maybe have several feeder tournaments throughout the year where the winner of each tournament is guaranteed a spot in the final WC tournament.
I'm open to suggestions.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #1 on: Mar 22nd, 2012, 3:52pm » |
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I know how I want the 2013 World Championship to be. I want it to be HUGE! I truly believe we could get 64 players with an open format. Having the largest Arimaa tournament ever is a far bigger draw to me than raising the monetary stakes.
On the other hand, I agree that this year's World Championship was also a success in a different way, moving towards professionalism rather than mass participation. There was high drama and many spectators. We could do it again and I wouldn't cry.
Let me tell anyone who (like me) wants a massive tournament that it isn't going to happen without a major commitment from someone to run it, and it isn't going to happen without a lot of volunteer help in addition to a dedicated TD. Omar's offer means to some extent that if you have a vision you can make it reality by volunteering, but also to some extent that if you aren't going to volunteer, your vision isn't going to happen. I'm at a stage in my life where I can't make that commitment to be TD for a 64-player Arimaa World Championship, so if push comes to shove, I'm just going to kick back and enjoy the elite event as a spectator and commentator with whatever time I happen to have available.
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| « Last Edit: Mar 22nd, 2012, 3:57pm by Fritzlein » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #2 on: Mar 22nd, 2012, 3:55pm » |
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on Mar 22nd, 2012, 2:53pm, omar wrote:| If I have to run the tournament again in 2013, I will probably limit it to eight players with the players who contributed most to the prize fund and who contributed earlier having a higher priority of being in the tournament. |
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I don't think you want to auction off the World Championship to the highest bidder. What if hanzack and chessandgo weren't in the top eight offers? Absurd! If you are going to limit it to eight, do it by rating, entirely separately from how you set the entry fee and/or prize money. If you happen to exclude the next hanzack based on his rating, it will be a tragedy, but a smaller tragedy than excluding any skilled player based on money.
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| « Last Edit: Mar 22nd, 2012, 3:58pm by Fritzlein » |
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Hippo
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #3 on: Mar 22nd, 2012, 4:45pm » |
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I would like huge triple elimination turnament as well.
What is nice in that format is that having 5 times as many participants prolog it roughly by 2 rounds ... even the three lose bracket fighting for 3rd place will not prolong the turnament.
Of course there would be problems with coverage of such many games and the first rounds may not be that much exciting, but starting from the third round it could be very interesting for enybody to watch.
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omar
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #4 on: Mar 22nd, 2012, 5:01pm » |
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on Mar 22nd, 2012, 3:55pm, Fritzlein wrote:
I don't think you want to auction off the World Championship to the highest bidder. What if hanzack and chessandgo weren't in the top eight offers? Absurd! If you are going to limit it to eight, do it by rating, entirely separately from how you set the entry fee and/or prize money. If you happen to exclude the next hanzack based on his rating, it will be a tragedy, but a smaller tragedy than excluding any skilled player based on money. |
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Yes, finding ways to limit the entry is always tricky.
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aaaa
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #5 on: Mar 22nd, 2012, 5:10pm » |
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Why not make the payout proportional to an exponentiation with the number of wins as power? For example, using base 2, hanzack would have won just over half of the total prize money, which looks fairly typical for a winner of a tournament and should, for anyone who doesn't have a serious chance of finishing high up, take away any notion of expecting a monetary gain from participation.
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omar
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #6 on: Mar 25th, 2012, 8:55am » |
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Thanks aaaa. I'll consider that for next year.
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omar
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #7 on: Mar 25th, 2012, 11:31am » |
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OK here is a proposal.
How about the WC finals having 8 players with the top player from the previous tournament having a seat in the finals. The other seven seats would be filled by running a series of seven single elimination tournaments. The first place winner from each of these tournament gets a seat in the WC finals. The WC finals would be an FTE as it is now. Even if each feeder tournament had 32 players it could be finished in 5 weeks. If you place first in one of the feeder tournaments you can't play in subsequent ones. All other players can try again up to seven times to get a seat in the WC finals. There would be a $10 entry fee each time you enter a feeder tournament. The entry fee would be added to the WC prize fund and is non-refundable.
The community can be involved with organizing the seven feeder tournaments and different people can be in charge of each of the seven tournaments so that the burden of running the tournaments is disbursed. For those running the tournament for the first time, I can guide them through the process.
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| « Last Edit: Mar 25th, 2012, 11:34am by omar » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #8 on: Mar 25th, 2012, 2:28pm » |
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Omar, are you completely uninterested in the Arimaa World Championship being (as it was in 2011) a promotional tool to get people who are on the margins of Arimaa to jump in and start playing each other? I admit, your latest proposal gives everyone a chance to be Arimaa World Champion via a series of victories over the board, which is good, but the format does nothing to tap into the tremendous energy and growth potential we saw in the 2011 tournament.
Having seven single-elimination feeders meets the demands of having an open format while spreading out the work so you aren't overwhelmed. But even though it is open to everyone, I doubt that we would get a large turnout. Why would lower-rated players pay $10 for a tournament in which they will likely be knocked out in a lopsided game in the first round? How is that fun? Do you expect them to try seven times and pay $70 for seven games, all of them huge mismatches? Single elimination is the worst possible format from a participatory standpoint.
I would love to see a big tournament, and I think that this goal is compatible with determining a World Champion. Yes, I understand there is some tradeoff in that the "championship" aspect is going to be watered down a bit if we try to structure it such that lots of people will want to play, but I would like to see that tradeoff. Arimaa needs to be promoted, and the World Championship is a great promotional vehicle. I'm willing to lose a bit of the hard-core determine-the-best player attitude to get more people to participate.
But, that said, I've come to the point where I'm willing to throw in the towel on an everybody-plays type of World Championship. If you don't want to focus on participation, let's just forget about it. Instead let's have a big Open Classic tournament that has nothing to do with the World Championship. Let it be a seven-round Swiss, no eliminations, with a minimal entry fee of $5, not distributed as prize money, but donated to arimaa.com for hosting the tournament. It's fine if there are no prizes; people will pay $5 simply for the pleasure of seven organized games, most of them not mismatches. Let's see if we can get people to jump on the Open Classic bandwagon even though it won't have the cachet of being the official designation of the world's best Arimaa player.
I'm going to stop giving recommendations for the World Championship format, and instead recommend that you do whatever you want to get your elite 8-player field, so that you don't need to waste any more energy on that and you can instead start spending energy on getting people involved again. It seems like player participation used to be more of your focus. You had participatory events like Player of the Month, where the whole point was simply to encourage HvH games. And remember how you restructured the Postal Championship to be a Postal Mixer, so it could be just for fun, everyone could compete at whatever level they wanted, and we could maximize participation? Now I see in another thread you want to make the Postal Mixer more about prize money for whoever wins more games, i.e. more like a Championship again. And remember how you said when we were discussing the format for the 2012 World Championship that lower-rated players didn't need to participate in the World Championship because they would have their own events tailored to give them evenly-matched games, but then you didn't organize even one such event all year, and put all your energy into the elite World Championship?
Arimaa is such a great game that participation is probably going to grow whether or not that's what you are promoting high on your agenda, but still, I would be happy if your emphasis was more like it used to be three or five years ago.
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Adanac
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #9 on: Mar 25th, 2012, 4:57pm » |
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As I mentioned in an earlier thread, I liked the old Open Classic / World Championship format. I'll make these suggestions:
1. Longer Open Classic, perhaps 8-11 rounds. This may mean starting in December rather than January and I have no idea how everyone will react to that.
2. Two or three week break between the Open Classic & World Championship. This will build more anticipation for the WC Finals and will make the qualifier feel like a different event than the World Championship. It will also give us targets dates for winter vacations, rather than 3-4 months of non-stop games. (Or summer vacation for southern hemisphere players?)
3. Specified number of victories to qualify for the Finals. For example, 7 victories in a ten-round Swiss would be similar to a quadruple-elimination Open Classic, except with a minimum game guarantee for all players.
4. Perhaps a single-elimination finals but I don't mind double- or triple-elimination if there aren't too many players.
I'll learn a lot about the Tournament Management Tool from the event I'm running this year. As long as I have enough free time next winter (I'm optimistic that I will) then I'd be happy to volunteer as an assistant for the 2013 WC to reduce Omar's workload.
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99of9
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #10 on: Mar 26th, 2012, 12:21am » |
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As usual I agree with Fritz and Adanac. To me this year's structure seems strategically counterproductive for the arimaa community as a whole. IMO more human players contesting the WC (or directly connected prelim event):
- is more fun
- is more fair
- raises community spirit through direct involvement
- is better for arimaa's reputation as a popular game
- will directly improve humanity's chances of holding out in the challege.
Newcomers who get to try their hand against the masters are the ones most likely to believe they can become masters one day. It was impressive that hanzack stepped up for it this year, but I think he is an anomaly in many ways!
Personally, I am again unlikely to enter if it's all money focused.
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chessandgo
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #11 on: Mar 26th, 2012, 3:58am » |
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I'm also for a larger player pool tournament. Instead of a longer prelimariy phase as Greg suggests, why not a "short" prelims and then a consolation bracket running in parallel of the top-8 finals so that everyone gets their share of games?
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thomastanck
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #12 on: Mar 26th, 2012, 7:02am » |
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I have no preference for more/less players, but certainly more players would mean allowing more people to participate. Also, I'm all for the consolation bracket idea that we once mentioned in the chatroom. Everyone that got eliminated gets into another bracket and gets to compete for the lower places before the actual championship ends.
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99of9
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #13 on: Mar 26th, 2012, 7:49am » |
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I'm not really sure consolation is the way to get more games in. Once the chance of winning is gone, the motivation of some players may drop, so I think that bracket would have lots of forfeits.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #14 on: Mar 26th, 2012, 7:59am » |
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on Mar 26th, 2012, 3:58am, chessandgo wrote:| I'm also for a larger player pool tournament. Instead of a longer prelimariy phase as Greg suggests, why not a "short" prelims and then a consolation bracket running in parallel of the top-8 finals so that everyone gets their share of games? |
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In fact, there doesn't need to be a sharp cutoff for when the consolation bracket starts. This isn't a new proposal, but I'll recap what I said before in case not everyone remembers.
We could play floating elimination with three (or any number of) lives and have the consolation run in parallel starting as soon as anyone got eliminated from winning the championship. After each round, the newly-eliminated players from the winners bracket would seamlessly feed into the consolation bracket. It could be paired exactly like the main event except with a dividing line: someone with three or more losses couldn't be paired against someone with two or fewer losses. People would be free to drop out after elimination, but also would be free to keep playing until the championship was decided. If the championship ran ten rounds, like it did this year, then everyone who entered would have a chance at ten games (or nine if they got stuck with a bye). The keeps the seriousness of an elimination format with the desirability of everyone who pays a registration fee getting a lot of games.
The reason to do this instead of using the Open Classic as a preliminary is to avoid the specter of manipulation in the last round of the Open Classic. Two potential problems were (1) someone already guaranteed a spot in the finals might purposely lose to get a more favorable pairing in finals via a lower seed or (2) someone already eliminated might purposely lose as a favor to his opponent who needs a final-round win to qualify.
The solution to Omar being overworked (again not new) would be to not provide commentary/recording until the winners bracket was down to eight players, and to have a community volunteer(s) deal with all pairing and (re)scheduling issues, so Omar would be responsible only for ironing out server failures.
on Mar 26th, 2012, 7:49am, 99of9 wrote:| I'm not really sure consolation is the way to get more games in. Once the chance of winning is gone, the motivation of some players may drop, so I think that bracket would have lots of forfeits. |
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Yes, that could be a problem, but it might not. We'd have to see how people would behave. Note that in the 2011 Open Classic, even though three losses eliminated people from contention to be World Champion, not a single person dropped out after losing for the third time. Note also that in the 2012 World Championship, where everyone knew the format going in, at least two people were agitating for more games after they got eliminated. Ocmiente in particular wanted some even games against people who ended near him in the rankings, but whom he didn't get to play in his three rounds.
There is a potential for many dropouts if we make the transition from "contender" to "also-ran" more explicit, but also potential for large participation to keep on chugging until the very end.
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| « Last Edit: Mar 26th, 2012, 8:06am by Fritzlein » |
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