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        Arimaa >> Events >> 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
        
(Message started by: Fritzlein on Apr 30th, 2014, 7:44pm)
Title: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 30th, 2014, 7:44pm
My semester will wrap up late this year due to my PhD qualifying exams, but after it is over I would like to try hosting a one-day tournament on Saturday, May 24, like the one-day tournaments Janzert has done.  I basically like his format of seven rounds starting every two hours on the hour with a time control of 60s/4m/100/0/4h/4m.  I like organizing it through the chat room to accommodate all the add/drops.

The one thing I would do differently is pair by hand rather than use the built-in pairing schemes that aren't really appropriate for a one-day event.  I would prefer all byes (whether voluntary via absence or involuntary by being odd man out) to count for 0.5 for purposes of pairing.  I say, better an imperfect implementation of a good algorithm by hand than an infallible implementation of a bad algorithm by computer.

Any thoughts?  I hope the turnout is as high as it was for the April tournament, and that arimaa.com doesn't inherently have to hibernate over the summer.
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by cvic on May 1st, 2014, 7:27am
Sounds great. Manual pairing will solve the only problem the previous tournaments had: weaker players getting crushed by top players.



Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Fritzlein on May 1st, 2014, 10:43am

on 05/01/14 at 07:27:37, cvic wrote:
Sounds great. Manual pairing will solve the only problem the previous tournaments had: weaker players getting crushed by top players.

Yes, the purpose of the pairing rule change is to make it more Swiss-like.  With only, say, eight people playing, there isn't a perfect answer, but everyone enjoys evenly-matched games better than mismatches.
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Janzert on May 1st, 2014, 6:36pm
Yay, great to see you're able to run this tournament.

Wanted to clarify a bit about past tournaments. The March tournament used the swissJuhnke pairing system. The two most relevant points of this system are that it is a non-global pairing system, and it groups players by number of wins/byes. The April tournament used the WC swiss section pairing. This a global pairing system and groups players by number of losses.

The problem with swissJuhnke and "non-global" pairing was twofold, first it didn't mind giving the bye to the same person multiple times and second it could get in situations where it couldn't pair people at all because of repeated pairings.

The larger problem with swissJuhnke though was that new players coming into the tournament would start out in the lowest score group. This results in many times the lowest ranked player playing a fresh player and never getting a chance to play another player close to their strength. Since the WC swiss groups by losses, the fresh players get put into the top score group and then "lose their way down". Although I can see some potential problems, I think this worked much better in practice.

As an aside, the built in swissJuhnke is not working on the new server. I have a feeling the problem is just ruby never got re-installed. I haven't asked omar to fix it though because after using it in practice I wouldn't recommend it for a "join and leave" tournament, so didn't plan to use it again.

I also don't believe the WC swiss pairing is available on its own and the pairing implementations installed on the server will not properly handle a lot of weird situations that could arise (think assigning a double win or loss). So I ended up running the pairing programs locally for both tournaments, for the first a slightly modified swissJuhnke (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/tourn/compare/sim/formats/swissJuhnke) (fixed a bug where it crashed on finding byes in the game record in some cases), and for the second my own implementation of the WC swiss pairing (https://github.com/Janzert/tournament_tools/blob/master/pairing/wc_swiss.py).

From your change above I take it you're trying to have fresh players come in roughly in the middle score group? This certainly seem reasonable.

Janzert
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Fritzlein on May 2nd, 2014, 12:10am

on 05/01/14 at 18:36:52, Janzert wrote:
From your change above I take it you're trying to have fresh players come in roughly in the middle score group?

Exactly.

Thanks for all the good information.  I will hit you up for more information if I can't remember or refigure out how to set up the tournament.
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by chessandgo on May 6th, 2014, 7:39pm
Sounds great! Thanks Janzert for the previous two tourneys, and thanks Fritz for carrying the torch!

My parents will be visiting on the 24th so I probably won't play, but with a bit of luck I might get the chance to squeeze in one game.
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Janzert on May 13th, 2014, 10:58pm
If it's still looking like you will have the time to do this, you might want to add an announcement in the game room so more players see that it is coming up.

Janzert
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Fritzlein on May 19th, 2014, 7:15pm
Event and announcement have been created.  Please let me know of any errors and oversights.
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Fritzlein on May 24th, 2014, 8:22pm
Thanks everyone who played!  Thanks lightvector for making bot_sharpP1P2 available so that nobody had to take a forced bye!

The number of HvH games per round was 3, 4, 5, 3, 3, 4, 4, for an average of 3.71.  That's a record participation for the come-and-go format.

Final results (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/mwiki/index.php/2014_Weekend_Tournaments#Results)
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Janzert on May 28th, 2014, 5:45pm
Very nice! Thanks again for running it Fritz. It's exciting to see that participation has held up even after the championship cycle has ended.

Janzert
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Fritzlein on May 29th, 2014, 9:48am

on 05/28/14 at 17:45:50, Janzert wrote:
Very nice! Thanks again for running it Fritz. It's exciting to see that participation has held up even after the championship cycle has ended.

Yes, the participation was awesome.  Did you say you were going to run one in June?  Or did you say July?
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Janzert on May 31st, 2014, 8:45am
I won't be able to run anything in June for sure. There is a possibility for July and an even better one for August.

Janzert
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Fritzlein on May 31st, 2014, 10:31am
Alas, June is not great for me either.  I could do July 12 or 19, though.
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Janzert on Jun 3rd, 2014, 3:09pm
If you don't mind running one in July, I'll plan on doing August.

Janzert
Title: Re: 2014-05-24 one-day open Swiss
Post by Fritzlein on Jun 4th, 2014, 10:10pm
OK, I will plan on July 12.


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