Ladder bowl- an alternative to Swiss

[mubo]

OK- so here's the idea. Blood bowl tournament.

1. You place all players in a ladder according to their Elo ranking with the race they have brought.

2. Pair off players based on some algorithm, ie penalising games that are many rungs apart + penalising games where players have played very recently.

3. Update the player rankings and reorder the ladder.

4. Repeat step 2-3 for n games.

5. A prize to the player who has gained the most ranking points over the 6 games.

6. Optionally have another prize for the player at the top of the ladder.

Pros:
- play players of similar abilitiy/attitude(!) right away
- no swiss advantage for drawing stunties R1/2.

Cons:
- how to handle new races for established players
- concept of "winner" is a bit unclear

[rolo]

What problem are you trying to fix here?

This penalizes people for bringing highly ranked teams - whoever starts your tournament on top of your ladder cannot win because he cannot gain position.
It also has the disadvantage that you have to recalculate every coach's ELO rating every round in order to "update the ladder".

And if you update the ladder based only on the games at that tournament so far, and give a trophy to whoever is at the top position at the end of your tournament, then you've managed to replace the Swiss system with ... ... the Swiss system.

[Barney the Lurker]

Ever since I read about the McMahon system I always thought we should give it a go in BB:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon_system_tournament

[mubo]

Thanks for the input.

I'm not sure what problem are you trying to fix here- could you explain please?

This stems from another discussion we were having elsewhere (Team England subforum) about rankings, I made the point that rankings are pretty worthless because similarly ranked players so rarely play one another. This was a possible alternative format to address this, just to provoke some ideas really.

This penalizes people for bringing highly ranked teams - whoever starts your tournament on top of your ladder cannot win because he cannot gain position.

You might be misunderstanding here. He/she could gain ranking points, and therefore win a prize. I appreciate the definition of "winner" in this format is unclear and would be interested to hear thoughts on if that's a problem for people.

It also has the disadvantage that you have to recalculate every coach's ELO rating every round in order to "update the ladder".

I don't think it's any harder than keeping track of scores in swiss.

[mubo]

Ever since I read about the McMahon system I always thought we should give it a go in BB:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon_system_tournament

Thanks Barney- I suggested this one year in the NAF championship feedback thread, but ppl felt it impacted the openness of the tournament. I think it's a good approach for large tournaments. Should help prevent players going 5-0-0 and not making the final.

[Barney the Lurker]

Ah yes, I remember now!

[besters]

I think Pearlies used to match coaches on ELO ranking in the 1st round. I think it lead to low ranking/vanilla teams being popular. Would this have the same impact?

[besters]

Ever since I read about the McMahon system I always thought we should give it a go in BB:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon_system_tournament

Thanks Barney- I suggested this one year in the NAF championship feedback thread, but ppl felt it impacted the openness of the tournament. I think it's a good approach for large tournaments. Should help prevent players going 5-0-0 and not making the final.

I'm torn on this one, I like the idea from the point of view that there would be less easy games and the final is likely to be self evident, but as was said about the NAF championship it could penalise good players in the early part of a tabletop career unless the rankings have some manual adjustment.

[PeteW]

It's a really interesting idea, and would be quite a different experience. I would love to try it!

You could easily come up with some sort of formula for the first round, eg. new tier 0 = max(rank), new tier 1 = 80% of max above 150, new tier 2 = 60% of max etc.

Then instead of recalculating each round you could just adjust the ladder.

Or, have 15 mins where people can challenge people up to 3 or 4 places above them?

Or make it round-less, so quicker people can play more games?! (Getting a bit crazy here).


Maybe there should be one tournament, where all the TE hopefuls MUST attend, using their favoured race, and then we have a massive ladder-off until the top 8 are picked! (This might be a joke.)

[rolo]

This penalizes people for bringing highly ranked teams - whoever starts your tournament on top of your ladder cannot win because he cannot gain position.

You might be misunderstanding here. He/she could gain ranking points, and therefore win a prize. I appreciate the definition of "winner" in this format is unclear and would be interested to hear thoughts on if that's a problem for people.

Ah okay, yes I was misunderstanding your idea and thought whoever gained the most positions on your ladder was the winner.
I do still think you're punishing highly ranked teams, since by definition it's harder for them to gain ranking than it is for middle or low-ranked teams. So a team with a 200 ELO ranking which goes 6-0 at your tournament might lose out to a team which entered at 100 ranking and then went 4-2, for example.
It would maybe encourage people to keep trying new races, which I approve of! Is that the goal here?

Big Boys' Battle seeds the first round using NAF Ranking, then uses Swiss System. So I guess I've actually played the McMahon system, without knowing what it's called!
But it plays out like a "normal" tournament; either you win your first round and play against someone else who won, or you lose and play vs a loser ...

I'd be interested to hear how things worked out, if people do try different matchmaking algorithms. Swiss System seems to be about as much of a constant as you get across Blood Bowl tournaments.

[mubo]

So a team with a 200 ELO ranking which goes 6-0 at your tournament might lose out to a team which entered at 100 ranking and then went 4-2, for example.

This is true! I think I'd have to rethink who gets a prize in this case...

[sann0638]

So a team with a 200 ELO ranking which goes 6-0 at your tournament might lose out to a team which entered at 100 ranking and then went 4-2, for example.

This is true! I think I'd have to rethink who gets a prize in this case...

Yes, this was my concern too. I'd make it prizeless - just playing for the glory of a 6-0-0 against other top coaches (which is what most top coaches play for anyway?).

[Pipey]

Pros:
- play players of similar abilitiy/attitude(!) right away
- no swiss advantage for drawing stunties R1/2.

Really interesting discussion this. The ladder certainly would get players of equal ability playing more regularly at your average event.

More generally it seems to tap into an observation (see Mubo posts in TE proposals thread) that the Swiss method is really very random, such that matches featuring higher ranked players are less frequent than we would like.

With perceptions floating around that some countries tournament scenes may be stronger than others (e.g. France > England*), I guess changes of this kind might actually improve that situation and drive standards up.

Something I've bounced around before - I think it would be really interesting to see a tournament a little like the ATP finals event in tennis, where the best players are matched against one another. This was one idea for my English Euro Cup tourney I ran last year, coming from the same place as Mubo's thinking. A tournament like this could actually be NAF ranked I think, as long as there was a way to allow any NAF member to participate. If we want that of course. The games wouldn't enter the database otherwise.

With all of this we do need to keep in mind that while we may play competitively, this is still a hobby played for fun. We don't want to alter things such that it becomes too competitive/elitist.

*naturally I'm going to take a parochial stance on this and resist this suggestion! I think we're doing pretty well but there's always room for improvement...

[ooarrtracter]

I did sound out Mr Goo last year about running a tournament using McMahon. This was based on a years performance from a structured tournament series, giving a slightly less penalising effect to new coaches as it was recent form, rather than NAF ranking.

In the end the tournament and the plan got binned for various reasons but the idea was resurrected this year. Instead of McMahon though I am using Accelerated Swiss at the BBALLs Cup for the teams. This should hopefully still allow a more definitive result while still giving the unseeded sides a chance to win, but then I have also added a second prize for best of the unseeded sides too.

Ninja Edit: Also in light of Pipey's remarks above we are running a BBALLs Masters event for the top 16 from the structured series. We are helped by a local tournament series and whether these systems could work on a country wide based system I don't know though.