A couple of months ago I asked readers of this blog to send in their suggestions as to what would make an ideal tournament in their view. I received many responses, some brief and to the point, others long and thoughtful. Rather than try to summarize all the various responses, I’m going to discuss tournament structures in general and how they might be changed or improved, working in some readers’ comments along the way.
How Current Tournaments Work
So that we’re all on the same page, let’s start by describing just how a modern ABT-type works. There are now about 20 of these tournaments every year, kicking off with the New York Metro in January and ending with the Los Angeles tournament in December.
Tournaments are run on a Thursday through Sunday or Friday through Sunday schedule. The Friday or Thursday/Friday part of the schedule launches a series of side events: Super Jackpots, Limited Jackpots (for non-Open players), Doubles, Seniors, Kickoffs, Blitzes, and so on. These side events almost always permit rebuys, so the fields are often 64 or 128 players.
On Saturday morning the Main Event begins. This usually has three sections, with an Open event (anyone can play) and a couple of lower divisions for less experienced players. Matches in the Open usually start at 11 points (sometimes only 9 points), and the matches are shorter in the lower divisions. The divisions are run as either double elimination with a progressive consolation (a loss puts you into the second chance bracket, where you still have a – theoretical – chance to win the tournament), or a Swiss system (each round you are paired with someone who has the same number of losses as you, and you need to lose three or four times before you’re eliminated.)
Clocks were introduced into tournament play in Kent Goulding’s U.S. Invitationals back in the 1980s, and they’re now pretty much universally used in the Doubles, the Open Division of the Main event, and the Super-Jackpots. The time limit is usually two minutes per point plus a 12-second delay (18 seconds for the Doubles events.)
Saturday and Sunday also feature some special events like an auction, quizzes, and beginner seminars.
The Comments
The comments I received ran the gamut. In general, people liked the way tournaments were being run now, but had plenty of suggestions about the different elements of tournaments. Here’s a representative sampling.
Basic Structure: The majority of respondents were quite happy with the double-elimination structure, feeling that getting knocked out of the tournament after a single loss was somewhat unfair. Some players liked the Swiss system better, because you were guaranteed at least three or four matches in the main event before being knocked out. Some players like the old single-elimination structure because it allowed for much longer matches.
One respondent had an idea which I’ve never seen tried but which seemed very interesting. Start the Main Event by dividing the field into groups of four who play a round-robin. The top two finishers in each group qualify for a single-elimination Main Event, while the bottom two go into the consolation, also single-elimination. Everyone is guaranteed at least three matches in the Main Event, and at least four matches overall.
Clocks: Clocks drew both positive and negative responses. Some wanted clocks in all events, and faster time limits to get in more matches. Other wanted clocks but with slower time limits to give weaker players a better chance.
Side Events: There was a general feeling here that side events were great but something needed to be done about the Sunday logjam, where many events were still in progress and players who had Sunday flights home but were alive in multiple events had a problem.
Ambiance: There was a real cultural divide here. Some respondents missed the amenities of early tournaments: cocktail parties, an auction dinner (or just a dinner), a dinner break long enough that you could linger over a meal without worrying about getting back in time for a round, a hotel bar that was open until the wee hours.
Some others wanted just the opposite: an atmosphere more like a chess or bridge tournament, with silence enforced, no spectators in the playing area, touch move, clocks, baffle boxes.
So – What Is To Be Done?
After sifting through the many suggestions and comments (thanks all!), I’m going to offer a few suggestions which I think would improve the tournament experience for just about everybody. None of these will require any new expenditure of time or money from the tournament directors. In fact, I think implementing some of these suggestions will cause them to make a slightly bigger profit and suffer a little less agita.
Here goes.
Main Event Structure
The most popular format today is the double-elimination, which means you have to lose two matches before you’re knocked out of the main event. Most of our respondents like it, so it’s not going away.
But I’m not a fan of it, because to get that second chance you have to pay a fairly heavy price. First, all the matches have to be short, because you have to play a lot of them in two days. And second, the ‘second chance’ that you’re offered usually isn’t worth very much.
This spring I played in a tournament where the main field was almost a full 64 players. I lost in the first round, so the winners advanced to the round of 32 while I moved into the loser’s bracket with the 31 other first-round losers. So what exactly were my chances here? I wasn’t in the round of 32, because each additional round of the winner’s bracket would send more players into the loser’s bracket, each time adding an additional round. So I looked at the drawsheet to see how many matches I’d have to win now to win the tournament.
The answer was nine. (It could have been ten, but in this tournament the winner of the loser’s bracket only had to beat the winner of the winner’s bracket in one match. In some tournaments the winner of the loser’s bracket has to beat the winner’s bracket winner twice to win.) The odds of winning nine in a row against equal opposition is 511-to-1, or about 0.2%. So indeed I did have a second chance – it just wasn’t much of a chance. There’s nothing unfair about any of this – the rules are the same for everyone – but it did mean that the ‘second chance’ was largely an illusion. And in order to have a hope of finishing on time, all the matches had to be short. They were 11 points in the winner’s bracket, 9 points in the loser’s bracket.
It’s certainly true that many players are quite happy with double-elimination events. They get to play lots and lots of matches over a weekend, which is why they come to tournaments. But I talked to a number of players who don’t like the brutally long schedule combined with the shortened matches, and heard from more when I solicited comments.
Is there a way to make everybody happy? I think so. Here’s my proposal.
Add a division.
Tournaments currently have three divisions, usually named something like Open, Advanced, and Intermediate. Let’s add one more to this. Call it the ‘Classic’ division. It’s a single-elimination tournament with a consolation. It starts on Friday with a cocktail party and a dinner, followed by one or two rounds depending on how many players show up. Losers on Friday all play in a Consolation on Saturday. Matches would start at 15 or 17 points, working up to a 23-point or 25-point final on Sunday. Consolation matches could start at 13 and go up from there. A reasonable entry fee for something like this might be $1200, with $200 going to the organizers to cover the cost of the Friday night festivities plus their fee.
The Classic division would take very little time or effort to run – a random draw on Friday night, another draw for the consolation on Saturday morning, and you’re done. Single elimination events have the advantage of being very easy to operate. Players could decide whether they wanted to play Classic or Open, but they couldn’t play both. My guess is that a Classic division like this would draw around 16 players, but it could be more. Some would be players who might have played the Open, but others would be players who wouldn’t have come otherwise. The risk to the organizers of adding a division is pretty near zero, and organizers should find this format more profitable.
The Sunday Logjam
Another bone of contention for many players was the jam-up of matches on Sunday. On Sunday the organizers have to finish all the side events that started earlier in the week, along with the Main, Consolation, and Last Chance in all three divisions. This isn’t much of a problem for the players who are leaving on Monday morning, but it’s a big problem if you’re alive in multiple events and your plane is leaving on Sunday at 5:00 PM or so.
A possible solution is to restrict the size of side events but have multiple copies, each of which was designed to finish on the day it started. If you think that you could get 64 players in a Seniors event, for instance, why not consider running four 16-player Seniors events? If you were running a Thursday through Sunday schedule, you might start a couple of Seniors events on Thursday, one on Friday, and a final one on Saturday. All four would have a good chance of finishing before Sunday afternoon. While the winner’s prizes wouldn’t be as big as with a single 64-player event, you’d have more prize-winners. Worth considering.
Rules
There’s one last point I’d like to discuss before logging off. This wasn’t raised by anyone in the survey, but I think it’s very important. It’s the question of having a set of rules that are well-understood and consistent with what has gone before.
One of the greatest assets a game can have is a set of rules that remain constant over time. It’s nice to be able to walk into a tournament and know, without any great discussion, what the rules are. It’s nice for experienced players, although they can adapt pretty easily to any minor change.
But it’s especially nice for beginners walking into a tournament hall for the first time. They’ve probably learned the rules from a book, and they’re probably a little nervous to be playing in their first event. Discovering that the playing rules are the same as the ones they learned at home is a little bit of a comfort. Discovering that the rules have changed, or are entirely optional, isn’t a plus for a beginner. The last few tournaments I’ve attended have begun with a Saturday-morning speech by the director explaining what rules were in effect, what rules weren’t in effect, and what rules were optional. If you would find that unsettling, imagine how it sounds to a newcomer. Since a steady stream of new players is the lifeblood of a game, this is a matter that needs to be taken seriously.
Rules do need to evolve over time, but such changes need to be governed by two ideas. First, changes should be rare. Second, the change should be a solution to a real problem that’s obvious to pretty much everyone.
Let’s look at two examples of rule changes and see the difference. From the start of backgammon tournaments in 1964 to about five years ago, the only real change in the rules came with the advent of clocks and the rules needed to accommodate them. Clocks weren’t introduced just because someone felt like the game needed to be updated and made more chess-like. Clocks were a solution to a real problem that was getting worse.
There had always been a problem in tournaments with matches that took widely different amounts of time. In any given round, some matches might be over in 45 minutes with a big cube that decided things, while others might take two or three hours with a match that consisted of a long series of one-point games. Players that finished quickly were annoyed they had to wait so long for their next match, and directors had to deal with the problem that a round lasted as long as its longest match.
The situation was annoying but tolerable. It became intolerable with the emergence of a new class of players – the stallers. These guys tried to play even more slowly in the hope of bothering their opponent so much that he would play quickly and make more mistakes. I once recorded a match in the semifinals of the Las Vegas tournament in 1982. One player rolled a 3-1 to start the 19-point match and fussed over the play for five full minutes. He put on a good show, looking at 10 and 23, 23 and 21, 13/9, 24/20, 6/2 and a couple of others before his a-ha moment, ‘discovering’ that he could make his 5-point. The match started at 10:00 pm on Saturday night and finished at 8:00 am the next morning. Thankfully, the staller lost 19-18.
The use of clocks ended this and other abuses, and clock rules slowly evolved to their current form. Problem solved.
Contrast this, however, to some of the recent rule changes. Take, for instance, the rule called “dice on checker”. For as long as anyone can remember, the rule regarding cocked dice was very clear. When you rolled two dice, both dice had to come to rest flat down on the playing surface on your right-hand side. Otherwise, the dice were cocked and had to be rerolled. It’s a nice rule – simple and unambiguous, with years of tradition behind it.
A few years ago the rule was rewritten to say that a die lying flat on a checker wasn’t cocked, and counted as part of a legal roll. Why? The old rule had never been recognized as a ‘problem’. It was clear, unambiguous, and universally accepted. Why change it? The best explanation that was put forth was that the new rule ‘speeded up the game’. But since the situation (a) rarely arose and (b) only required a few seconds to reroll, this explanation didn’t carry much water. Eventually the die on checker rule became optional, up to the discretion of each tournament director.
But notice the difference between this situation and the introduction of clocks. In the first case a problem (stalling and slow play) was actually solved. In the second case a problem (what’s the rule?) was caused where none had existed.
That’s all for now. Hopefully, some will find this discussion useful. And hopefully, a director or two will be willing to try out the idea of a Classic division. I don’t think it will detract from an existing tournament in any way, and a new option where none existed before might draw in some players who otherwise wouldn’t attend.
