billiv15 wrote:
Well of course it's not, but it's still pretty darn good. Let's make a comparison.
Looking at Gencon. Player A beat player B, both end at 5-2, along with 7 other people at 5-2 who did not play one another. Assuming the normal that 2 make the top 8. Player A has a lower SoS and Player B has the best SoS of all the 5-2s because his two losses were to player A and the lone 7-0 player. Since head to head doesn't break the tie, player B gets ranked 8th with the top SoS of the 5-2s, and since player A, whose SoS is lower than all the other 5-2s, happened to beat player A (his top ranked opponent), he gets ranked 7th because of head to head being 2nd. How on earth is that somehow more fair?
Well I can agree that for a larger event like the GenCon main tournament, yeah, the argument against Swiss breaks down. But Swiss is used for all things DCI, and not every tournament is a 70-100 person event. It's at the local levels, where there are typically 8-20 people (regardless of what game we are talking about) where so many of the problems with the program become apparent.
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And as too the garbage that you have "no control" that is untrue. You have no control in the first round, but after that Swiss is totally in your control. It is only when you lose that you move down, otherwise, no matter who you played, you continue to rise over the tables.
It's not "garbage." I have no control over whom I play. Yes I can win or lose and face people with like records most of the time, but I still don't get to choose which ones I face at my rank level. And it is not "when you lose you move down," either. You really need to learn more about the system. Depending on how many players there are, a player can be paired down, meaning one with a higher rank could face one with a lower rank if there aren't enough people at the higher ranked player's level. It's all completely random, within that structure I should add.
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What you call a "flaw" I call a strength. We are just going to have to agree to disagree that one system is more "fair" than another. I believe SoS in swiss is much more important than head to head match ups, since you don't play the same set of opponents, and you do not. That's cool, but I think in big tournaments, it generally works pretty well (and I don't need to hear your issues of abuse back from the Magic days either). Pointing out flaws that I am already aware of does not tell me that head to head play is superior, when you are not playing common opponents.
I don't really know what my "Magic days" has to do with this. I think we are looking at this from two different angles (big tournament that happens one day out of 365 vs. the weekly tournament at the LGS).
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However, I recommended and fully support using head to head as the 3rd tie breaker. In the case where two guys ended with the same record, and the same SoS, then if one guy beat the other, I am all for it. That is as far as I am willing to go with it.
Well finally something we can agree on, or close enough.
EDIT: The thing that you seem to be forgetting or perhaps overlooking is that SoS is not determined in a vacuum. It's not just about who I faced or how my opponents performed. It takes into account who they played, whether or not they got a bye, and then it looks at who my opponents' opponents' records, and factors all of that in. SoS is more accurately labeled "field of play" because it evaluates every single player's role in the tournament to determine each person's score. So when I said I have no control over that, that was correct. Beyond my own ability to win or lose each game, which in the grand scheme of Swiss is fairly insignificant when it comes time to rank, the system is random and you have to have a fairly large event for it to make sense. It's just not a good program for LGS tournaments that draw less than 20 people most weeks.