If there is anyone out there sufficiently dedicated to do it then I see no reason someone couldn't write a tournament scheduling program that produces a complete schedule when given a list of teams and seedings, number of pitches, start and finish times, game lengths and the format of the tournament. It could then produce a schedule that wouldn't have teams playing back to back unless absolutely necessary and could include any other specific conditions decided upon by whoever writes it. I would have to say that any other conditions included would have to be discussed on BritDisc before they were included. In fact if the program turns out to be useful there is no reason it couldn't be expanded to include scoring tournaments (given most TD's now have laptops around anyway), calculating next rounds and (given the availability of a projector) showing on a big screen the results so far (wouldn't that be nice!). Finally if the program is seen to work then it could well turn out to be a good investment for UKUA as they could sell it to others Ultimate teams for use at other Ultimate tournaments and to other sports for use in their tournaments. This could turn out to be a nice little earner for the UKUA as once written the program would need very little updating and could be resold again and again.
Mark P Strange Blue On Jul 12 2006, Jon Palmer wrote:
BD, It must be a full moon or something, Benji and I seem to agree with each other. I think it's important to get a few things straight about expectations/standards at tournaments.Players(the Consumers) 1. Stop making unreasonable demands of the TDs. Running a tournament is hard, takes a lot of effort and most of it goes unappreciated. 2. You can't have you cake and eat it. It is unreasonable to expect to get up after 6am drive to the tourney, play several long games, not play back to back, have a shower, eat a chicken balti, drink ten pints, flirt with the locals in some dive bar, find you tent and still get enough sleep to play the next day. If you want longer non back to back games your have to start earlier and finish later if you want to time to party you'll play shorter games back to back. 3. Sort your teams out and stop dropping out at the last minute. TD's are planning the tournaments months and months in advance. Show them and the sport a little respect and get yourselves organized to have a team at the tournament ready to play. 4. Stop bitching about food and water. Yes its nice if they provided but learn how to use a supermarket and how to fill a water bottle.TDs/DoCs (the suppliers) 1. Don't try to do too much. 2. Get a good venue with enough good quality marked pitches, provide hot showers a source of drinking water and get yourselves a good robust schedule. Everything else is a bonus. 3. Don't adjust you schedule at the last minute to accommodate drop outs. Either write a few versions of the schedule well in advance or just write a good schedule that will adjust acceptably with dropouts. Last minute changes are almost always worse than the original schedule with byes for the missing team. Changing the schedule and getting it wrong makes it seem like your fault. It's not, the fault lies entirely with the team(s) that dropped out. 4. Don't me too nice with team that are struggling for numbers. Force them to commit well before the tournament and heavily fine/black list teams that dropout late.More specifically on Scheduling I have some other suggestions 1. Spend more time on it. Writing a schedule is part process and part art. The more time you spend on it the more likely you are to come up with the best solution. 2. Ask for help. Myself and others have considerable experience writing schedules and would be willing to help, just ask. 3. Write schedules that don't have a little dependence on the initial seedings as possible. for example triple elim as used by the students to great success over the past few years or more simply make sure there are crossover rounds.Changing the structure of the B tour would also help the problem. I suggested it before make a C tour. The benefits being: 1. There is a big gap in standards of play/expectation in the B tour. Some teams are happy just to be playing others are pushing hard for the top8 or qualification to the A tour. Let the structure reflect that. 2. you guarantee 16 teams in the B tour and can use a variety of very stable easy to schedule formats for 8 pitches that have long games, decent breaks in between games, less dependence on seeding and a fair chance for each team to progress. 3. Any drop outs don't affect the B tour numbers or format of schedule. 4. You can use more flexible formats for the C tour where longer games are less of a necessity. 5. It is much easier to write a few versions of a fair flexible schedule for a smaller number of teams in the C tour.Lastly on tiebreakers I really think its simple. Use points difference amongst tied teams (so for two tied teams use the head to head result). Using points difference across all common opponents is just nonsense, teams play other teams in a variety of conditions, time of day, weather, orientation of the pitch to the wind etc. etc. all of which affect the points difference. If two teams are tied on wins then the only thing that should matter is who won when the played the same game, on the same pitch in the same conditions.More than enough for me, thanks for reading. JP On 7/10/06, Ben Heywood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:I have two points I want to raise: 1) The schedule was not good enough. 2) Why not have a Tour Qualifier? (See next email, for people who don't care about scheduling nonsense). 1) Schedule Two major problems - a) the format was completely unsuitable for deciding the best three teams from a (necessarily) badly seeded event, and b) the pitches were severely underused. a) We were in a pool of 3. We lost a game to the 3rd (I think) seeds, and immediately we couldn't finish above ninth. We did finish ninth, although I don't wish to claim that we could otherwise have got promoted. That's not relevant - what matters is that it is OBVIOUSLY possible for the best 2 (or even 3 !! ) teams to be in the same group, and only one could come close to promotion. This is clearly wrong. There is no way that the first B tour of the year can be decided by giving each team only five matches. Long matches between equally-good teams are great, but they are not more important than a fair tournament. Solutions: Obviously, more games. If that means shorter games, so be it. My personal suggestion would be to have loads of 45 or 60 minute games on the saturday, and then three proper length QF SF F games for each group of 8 on the sunday. The short saturday games are necessary so that more teams play each other and the placings are more fairly decided; and anyway, a lot of such games will be severe mismatches that won't need 105 minutes to decide. Those few games which are close and are tight for time are a small price to pay for having a tournament structure that's anywhere close to fair. b) There were 12 pitches this weekend, and 24 teams. That's plenty. Pitches were in use from 9am until close to 7pm on saturday - 10 hours. In that time (I still find this hard to believe) THREE games were played on each pitch. People have complained earlier today about not getting great facilities for their fees - pitches cost massive amounts, and if they're underused in this way it's no wonder it doesn't look like value for money. Would you believe that 2 pitches had ZERO games on the saturday? I'm still struggling with that one. Surely it's blatantly obvious that if we have a tournament that requires more games to generate a fair result, AND we have a shedload of spare pitch time, there's a plausible solution not far away...it's frankly a disgrace that crossovers, as a bare minimum, were not added to the schedule. The idea of trying to guarantee that no team ever plays back to back games in the way used this w/e (leaving a 2-hour gap between games on each pitch) is in my opinion wrong. The cost of this is too high - no games to watch when you're not playing, but far more importantly the waste of pitch time. Back to back games are a necessary evil of weekend tournaments. They should be minimised, and there should never be 3 games back to back, but it's daft, at B-tour level, for everyone to be sitting around for a couple of hours with nothing happening. In pool play, there is NEVER any need for back to back games - half the pools play a game, then the other half. On the same pitches. If a gap is to be included in a tournament schedule, it should be placed after pool play and before crossovers, and/or after crossovers and before QFs, which are the only times that back to back games are sometimes inevitable*. It absolutely need NOT be shoved in between pool games. Where's the constructive criticism in (b), you ask? Well, there's not a lot that can be said - it's been done now and nothing can change it. The only constructive suggestion is that this situation can be avoided easily by asking for help. It isn't easy dealing with three schedules at once, I'm sure, but people can help. As indoor DOC, I'd have been more than happy to help sort out some outdoor schedules, and I know at least a little about it. Both Rich Hims and Jon Palmer have had extensive theoretical and practical experience of scheduling. So, two main points: - Don't put huge gaps in the tournament schedule - 90 min games are not more important than giving everyone a fair chance in the tournament ------------------------------------------ And a few very minor points that vexed me also this weekend. - We came ninth, but for some utterly inexplicable reason the plate went to 17th. I always thought that everyone who won all three sunday games got a wee trophy (cup, plate, bowl, etc... for 1, 9, 17, 25 etc). No fair. (boohoo) - The most important game (1st v 2nd in the pool) was first up for us. Normally, that would be the last pool game, so that everyone can get into the tournament playing the bigger (expected) mismatches. - Fire 2: I understand the thinking behind 'punishing' Fire for not entering later tours last year. But not only did they get punished, so did all the teams in their pool who were demolished by a blatantly A-tour team. Surely a better solution to this can be found - in fact, see my next email... * In a tournament with reasonable numbers of teams, that is. If there's something daft like 27 teams then sometimes that will lead to back-to-back games. Otherwise, it'll be (after crossovers) top 8 QF; bottom 8 QF; then top 8 SF etc. No problems. __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ranulf.net/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/informed.asp__________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ranulf.net/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/informed.asp
__________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ranulf.net/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/informed.asp
