What do you think about a team format tournament?

[aibretty]

So I've been playing with tsh a lot in the past week trying to figure out how to do pairing formats, etc for CUSS WORDS.  One of the conclusions that I have come to is that I might just scrap class prizes altogether.  The reason being that I might just have everything be team-play.

The idea is, you show up having been preassigned to a team.

Comments

Re: I like it...

[picopaco]

I did not have time or energy to do any real statistical analysis. I basically went to x-tables to get a general idea of average score for players at various ratings levels. I also looked at spread in some open tournaments. I wanted to keep things really simple, so I decided that the lower rated player in each game would get "bonus points" equal to 1/10 the difference in ratings of the two players. So, for example if a 1614 played a 1312, then the the 1312 would get 30 points (1614 - 1312 = 302 / 10 = 30.2). This system doesn't really even up the playing field, as the higher rated player usually still has the advantage, just not as much, but that's how I wanted it. I would say it ended up being a fun experiment.

In case you're interested in how it played out... There were 8 players (1848, 1794, 1626, 1544, 1521, 1408, 1284, 1178). We played 6 games with random pairings and no repeats. 4 games had their outcomes changed because of the handicapping (both the 7 and 8 seeds beat the 4 and 6 seeds because of the bonus points). The top players also had some very close games with the lower rated players. The top 3 spots paid out to seeds 1, 2, 7 in that order.

Re: I like it...

[picopaco]

Correction: it was actually 5 rounds of random pairings and 1 round of KOH.