We have now discussed modifications for the current European Championship tournament. Here I would like to outline the championship tournament where I would like to participate as a player and a spectator.

Indeed current system is very good. On the other hand EGC as a brand attracts more than enough participants from all over the world. That indicates that it is working well. Perhaps the biggest problem with current brand is not the lack of attraction of strong and average skilled participants, but EGC being over popular. 700+ player megatournament is demanding task for organizers to whom do not get paid for proper salary. Therefore as long as we can find organizers, there seems not to be good reasons to chance the format of current EGC. Format is working properly.

But there are some technical details that I would like to suggest to be improved. Current idea of having 32 player’s super group is not good because it is over sized. In Groningen we suffered from the symptoms of having over sized super group that even winner was difficult to determine and Eunkuk won by tertiary tiebreaker. For that reason we need to reduce the size of super group to 16 or 24 players. But if we reduce the size, the gap between weakest 4-dan players and super group players would grow too large, thus we need to introduce middle group between super group and rest of the top group. These changes would reduce the probability of match ups that has little relevance for the EC and EGCC titles.

But there is also other difficulty with current EC system. Namely that McMahon, Swiss or Round Robin is not very friendly from audience standpoint. Imagine Wimbledon tennis tournament that is played as dull, but effective McMahon that declares Federer as a Champion by two SOS’s against Nadal!

People want real games that do not require understanding of abstract and highly technical tournament system, but games where winner of individual game will determine the champion. Therefore we need to have separate finals for two best European players. Finals need to be separate, because I am playing my own tournament and I do not have time to watch them, if EC finals are played parallel with EGC main tournament.

In the case of Groningen EGC we had top Europeans Dinerstein, Taranu, Mero and Pop in 41 MMS. Soses were respectively 404, 402, 400 and 398. Dinerstein was champion, but difference to Taranu and Mero was not too big. Thus I would like suggest that during some weekend after EGC, first Mero and Taranu would play semifinals and winner of semifinals would play against Dinerstein best of three games finals. Alternatively we could have full semifinals with top 4 players or just heads up between top two.

It is reasonable to assume that we can find sponsors for these final matches so that it will cover for participant’s travel and accommodation costs and decent prizes. Preferred location for the finals would be where these costs are minimized, and budget should be fully independent from EGC budget. And also we could even collect ticket revenues from spectators. That means that if people want to watch matches in real time from EuroGoTv and KGS, they must pay (perhaps around €10). After all we cannot march to Wimbledon finals and demand watching them on live without paying from the seat in audience or at least for television rights.

I am sure that if we make payment easy enough and we have proper commentators, we can find more than enough people who are willing to pay for the highest possible quality entertainment.

This will be the core of my proposal for the new EC system. I hope that we have good discussion so that we can polish the details.

So, the European Go Congress serves as a qualification tournament for the (closed) European Championship. I think that is a sensible approach, I have proposed it myself in a different thread:



Of course, you have to think about the corner cases. What should happen in these cases, and how do you devise a system that naturally covers them?

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

Which is your rank? Can you prove what your rank is by stating your real name? Is your rank relevant for the EC or are you a kyu player, who just benefits from the marketing gag that the EC would be a tournament for players of all strengths?



1) If it were very good, then you need not propose improvements.

2) The current system is not very good for the various reasons stated during the previous decade everywhere.



Your rhetorics is wrong. First you claim that the current system was very good, then you pretend to construct a contrary point by actually stating some that your consider good.



1) From all over the world is an exaggeration. E.g., where are the many South Americans?

2) That kyu players and low dans play in what is called the EGC is a marketing gag rather than evidence of quality.

3) Where it might matter (at the top), "all over the world" is South Korea or in other years a few strong Japanese.



How does the marketing gag have any relevance for the quality? Or do you equate quality with "greatest number of countries the participants are from"?

Since you suggest that the tournament might be too big, the number of participants can't be your reason.



Great. Salaray for tournament supervisors, rules commission, local tournament organization etc. You don't mean it seriously, do you? I would not object but it is not a requirement to organize the congress well.



Do you mean here that it is being organized well enough or that the system is ok?



In fact, there are lots of major or technical details that could be improved. Proper clocks to have 45s byoyomi when the rules say so or proper rules of play, to name just two technicalities.



It is not over-sized. Since up to about 8 of them are non-Europeans, 32 usually means up to about 24 Europeans. This is just about enough to be sure that the currently strongest player is included.



1) In every tournament system that uses (opponent-dependent) tiebreakers, the winner can be determined by them.

2) The problem of final result tiebreakers having any impact at all is NOT the supergroup size but is the mere fact that FINAL RESULT TIEBREAKERS ARE USED AT ALL. (Proof: Omit all final result tiebreakers. Then, for any supergroup size, the final results are independent of tiebreakers! - Keep tiebreakers and change the supergroup size and the final results do depend on tiebreakers.)

3) The winner is not "difficult to determine" if there are tiebreakers. It just takes half an hour or so to verify manually what the pairing program claims to be the top results. So it is nasty rather than difficult.

4) As described elsewhere, SOS as a final result tiebreaker has many aspects it depends on and that might be criticised. One of them is the "convergance" by means of ensuring a "fair" pairing strategy (like fold pairing in all or most rounds). The smaller the supergroup size the more closely the final SOS values of tied top players can be. So making the supergroup size smaller does not solve the problem but lets it become yet more apparent.

5) It was not only in Groningen.

6) The problem really is the creation of a number greater than 1 of top MMS players after the last round in a tournament with a fixed number of rounds. This can be solved (e.g. by using a dynamic number of rounds or by changing the fundamental tournament system). It cannot be solved by changing the supergroup size though. (Maybe one achieve a tiny tuning effect - in theory. In practice, the number of Koreans dramatically changes and the tuning will turn out to be possibly counter-productive.)

7) In summary, what you observe as symptoms are not the symptoms of a specific supergroup size but of other aspects (like the usage of tiebreakers at all or like the concept of not sharing the title at all or like having a fixed number of rounds).



Tertiary?

***

I leave the rest of your heavily flawed text uncommented.

Harleqin, if it were feasible (it is not considered to be, see the related AGM vote that the EC be at the congress), then one possible solution to your case study is:

- Let M be the number of wins of the top player(s).
- Players with M or M-1 wins can qualify at all.
- Players with M-1 wins need to win their relegation game to then also have M wins.
- If then the number of players with M wins is 2+, then there will be finals. Otherwise the single player already is the champion.

I have said before that the AGM votes you so frequently mention were a very, very bad idea, if they are to be taken as an absolute. You can assume that any proposal that would contradict one of those votes includes a motion to revise that vote; otherwise, there will never be a change.



Against whom are these relegation games to be played?



How do you think the finals should be played? Should there be a round-robin, swiss, or knockout tournament? How would that depend on the number of players?

What do you think of a "challenge" format, where the winner of one year challenges the previous title holder for the title?

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

You are repeatedly condescending about the value of the input from those with weaker ranks Robert, it does your cause no good. With respect, you are also not sufficiently strong to be an EC challenger, should we treat your view accordingly?



Or perchance, there is rising concern with how the commission is handling possible changes, and this is partially a vote in favour of the current system being good enough not to change. The current system has issues that concern a number of people - that does not make the system "not very good", except perhaps in the eyes of a vocal minority.



What nonsense. You cannot throw around your subjective opinions as to what constitutes quality at the expense of other people's subjective opinions. If it is seen as high quality by a majority because it is all inclusive, than that is more important than any individual's opinion.



Again, this is only your subjective opinion, and I don't believe it is based in facts. I don't believe that, in any given year, 24 Europeans are seriously strong enough to challenge equally for the title. Anyone below a strong 6 dan is simply not in the practical running. Some stats and data from the last 8 years:

2009

Top five places: 7d, 7d, 6d, 7d, 7d
European 7d or professional players: 5
European 6d players: 7
Non-European 7 dans / professionals: 5

Possible supergroup size for 6d+ Europeans and 7d+ Non-Europeans = 17

2008

Top five places: 7d, 7d, 7d, 6d, 6d
European 7d or professional players: 4
European 6d players: 7
Non-European 7 dans / professionals: 6

Possible supergroup size for 6d+ Europeans and 7d+ Non-Europeans = 17

2007

Top five places: 6d, 7d, 7d, 6d, 5d
European 7d or professional players: 2
European 6d players: 6
Non-European 7 dans / professionals: 4

Possible supergroup size for 6d+ Europeans and 7d+ Non-Europeans = 12

2006

Top five places: 7d, 7d, 6d, 6d, 5d
European 7d or professional players: 2
European 6d players: 5
Non-European 7 dans / professionals: 2

Possible supergroup size for 6d+ Europeans and 7d+ Non-Europeans = 9

2005

Top five places: 7d, 7d, 6d, 7d, 6d
European 7d or professional players: 4
European 6d players: 4
Non-European 7 dans / professionals: 9

Possible supergroup size for 6d+ Europeans and 7d+ Non-Europeans = 17

2004

Top five places: 7d, 7d, 4d, 7d, 7d
European 7d or professional players: 4
European 6d players: 9
Non-European 7 dans / professionals: 3

Possible supergroup size for 6d+ Europeans and 7d+ Non-Europeans = 16

2003

Top five places: 7d, 6d, 5d, 5d, 6d
European 7d or professional players: 1
European 6d players: 7
Non-European 7 dans / professionals: 4

Possible supergroup size for 6d+ Europeans and 7d+ Non-Europeans = 12

2002

Top five places: 7d, 6d, 5d, 7d, 6d
European 7d or professional players: 2
European 6d players: 5
Non-European 7 dans / professionals: 0

Possible supergroup size for 6d+ Europeans and 7d+ Non-Europeans = 7

Trends that appear from this analysis

* It is very clear to me from this data that 5 dans are out of the running from the beginning, they are simply not title contenders.
* The number of European 6 and 7 dans combined have never exceeded 13 (and only 3 times out of the 8 did they even exceed 10!)
* Even including non-European 7d+ players, a supergroup built from all of these would never have exceeded 17 players - just over half the current supergroup size.

It is very hard not to conclude that having 24 Europeans in the super group seems like the net is being spread far too wide - just too many players. What is the justification for 32 with the expectation of 24 Europeans?



1. Correct.
2. Straw man. Just because it happens doesn't mean a smaller super group size would not help.
3. Correct.
4. Not correct. You may still end up with hard to resolve ties, but the chances that more of the top games were played against each other increases, so the "fair pairing" argument is moot.
5. Correct.
6. Not correct. The supergroup size may still leave tied players, but at least they'll have had the chance to beat each other and player less games against weaker players to leave the tie in the first place.
7. Not correct. You have missed the point of the original poster. The poster wasn't trying to eliminate ties per se, but make sure the correct champion is identified on performance. A small supergroup will adjust the draw in a way that may help towards this.



I have no idea why you would state this. A lot of your comments have flaws in them, some of them severe ones. If I'm not going to comment on them, I won't comment - I won't go out of my way to condescend the original poster. This is virtually flaming.

Tiebreaker is not same as fair tiebreaker. You can also use players horoscope signs as a tiebreaker. Problem is that it is difficult to find winner of the tournament if there are more players competing than there are rounds. Using dynamic amount of rounds is extremely poor tiebreaker and I would rather use horoscopes.

It seems that you have difficulties of understanding that for the super group size only thing that matters is what is the skill distribution of players. Even the number of rounds is irrelevant! The larger is the skill distribution the less there are rounds for strongest players to play each other and solve mutual arrangement, because strongest players will play against players whom do not have much relevance for the title. If we halve the super group size, we gain one extra round for top players to find the champion. Logic is not that more complex and in this case more is always better. Perhaps we could even allow players to play twice each other with opposite colors, if necessary.

From the pairing perspective it is not very good idea to use folding, but split and slip is better pairing method, at least for the first rounds. For latter rounds split and random is also possible.

For the rest of your comments, I leave them be, because your reasoning skill and reading comprehension is just flawed.

Let him be. What Jasiek omitted of commenting, was mainly about entertainment. It is purely understandable, that entertainment is unknown and flawed subject for jasiek.

(I am sorry for this ad hominem, but I had to =)

Against each other. If there is an odd number of M-1 players, then one of them plays an M-2 player.



My personal opinion and supposing sufficiently available time? Double round-robin with full thinking time. If then there is a tie for place 1, keep it.



Very bad. It gives too good chances to the title holder, even if his relative strength should already be lower then that of competitors.

I do not like the idea of challenger system. Main point is of course the EGC. Finals are just finals.

{addendum: I first thought to write: "I do not like the idea of challenger system, because it sounds too Japanese and does not fit to Western values", but I omitted that as too fuzzy and speculative and unnecessary. Perhaps it was a mistake to omit! But we westerners play fair and simple and for the sake of entertainment.}



AGM and EGF and Jasiek are of course absolutely irrelevant for the EC finals. We need only breakfast's and Taranu's opinion for this. If they, as a best two players in Groningen, think that we should have finals we of course can have finals. If the idea is good and popular, it will flourish and soon it will gain official status. Even EGF is made of people. Usually it is better to do things first and bureaucracy will follow later.

I love it. It would actually mean something when you talk about the X being the European Champion. It would have a present tense meaning rather than the past tense meaning we have now ("X was the winner last time, but who knows who the winner will be this time").

I can't see it being agreed upon, tho, its just too foreign to westerners who obsess about notions of fairness, and don't give much respect to title holders. I don't mean this only in Go, it cuts across all sports and games.

In Japan you have to qualify for the right to challenge, e.g. the Meijin, is it the same in Korea/China?

There is a challenge format in the UK which works well. Effectively there's an 8 player round robin league, the top two places play a best of 5 title match. Qualification for that league is 7 qualifying players (from a qualifying tournament) + the current champion. This works well to have a challenger reward, a 1 vs 1 focus title contest, and a good qualification system to ensure everyone gets a shot and the best performers play in title match itself.

I fully appreciate statements from any source (European or not, dan or kyu, human or software) if the statements are factual and supported by good reasoning.

If somebody hides himself behind anonymity and makes subjective statements without good reasoning, then I cannot evaluate his legimate interests. It might be a troll, liar without taking responsibility, multiple namer or person paid for upholding an opinion. Accordingly cautiously I appreciate his statements.

Maybe somebody is a kyu with little prospect of soon improvement. He could easily state "I want to play in the EC under these and those circumstances" but what would be the relevance? That he can boast "I play in the EC each year!"?



Quite contrarily my ability and desire to distinguish between open and hidden personalities does the cause good.



What is an "EC challenger"? This expression is used in systems that end in a 2 persons match.



You are free to choose your view. It is your human right.



Which commission? The EGF Rules Commission? Do you even know how it is handling possible changes? I can speak for myself but I am not the commission.

Which concern do you mean?



This is whose opinion? Yours? The commission's?



If a system is called "very good", then the quality is so good that no change is needed. If a system's basic structure is called "very good" while the system's details are called "worth improving", then change is suggested for the details; the overall system is thus not "very good" but maybe "good". I.e., I want honesty and clarity in the statements instead of dull propaganda.



Like the AGM? The politicians would be the vocal minority? And who is the majority, how do you assess it except by guessing wildly?



A championship's major purpose is to determine the strongest player(s). Clearly kyu players and low dans do not belong to the strongest players. Therefore the aspect of letting them have the joy of playing in what is called also for them the championship is not the major purpose. This is reasoning and not, as you suggest, nonsense. It is also not at the expense of other people's opinions because they still may have them.

Tell me: Does the majority (the kyu players) think that the all inclusive aspect would be of greater importance than the purpose of determining the strongest? No? Then why do you throw around such a rhetorical trick?

Maybe the kyus think that is was one of the desirable aims. If so, then "quality" is NOT defined to equal only the all inclusive aspect. Rather then quality is defined to include, among other aspects, both purposes: a) the championship's major purpose of determining the strongest and b) the fun for all aspect of the tournament being all inclusive for players of all ranks. Under such a definition, high quality we then get when both (and other) aspects have it.

You, however, construct a "more important" argument for only (b).



Because you do not read the facts. The facts are that 5d can sometimes become European Championship (see 2001), that (currently) almost only the latest ratings are used for seeding the Europeans and that fast enough rating changes for a currently strongly improving 5d into the top 10 or 16 present rated Europeans is pretty hard.



Who said so? At no time and under no circumstances will you find anywhere 24 players of a population who would compete all with EQUAL strengths. The excitement of a championship is that players having varying strengths over time and champions do change from year to year.



Let you be told for the 20th time: It does happen that a 5d becomes the champion.



You forge statistics brilliantly. Evaluate 9 years for greater precision!



See above. You are wrong.



Thank you for the partial statistics.



Within your tight view inside forged statistics. Forged because deliberately your exclude all contrary information.



That 5d do have a chance. See 2001.

I would have a hard time bowing to an opinion from someone who compares communism and the system behind the European Championship to justify his agenda. But well, it could just be me =)

_________________
My "guide" to become stronger in Go

It is worth studying all possible cases. Maybe for some of them, changing the supergroup size does have some effect... IF all other parameters (like number of non-Europeans, expected outcomes of games) are constant. Suppose we had a complete table of supergroup size and all the other relevant parameters, do you think it is worth the effort to spend an hour studying it, delaying the first round by possibly that time and then still let final results depend on SOS with then slightly other values? Maybe, by using such a perfect table, you reduce the frequency of place 1 ties on wins from 53% to 47%. Does that solve the problem for you? For me, it does not. It is merely treating symptoms by the wrong medicine. Interesting for the rules freak but you could not explain to the general go public why a specific supergroup size was chosen and what its effect on the final result list might have been.



Yes, THIS aspect is an advantage of a smaller supergroup size. However, it does not solve the SOS issue. Do not confuse the two aspects.



Be more precise what of 6. you consider incorrect.



This is a different aspect than the ones I have spoken about in 6., also see above.



Exactly this is the problem: Not eliminating ties while interpreting ties by tiebreakers causes the problem of uncertainty about whether who is identified is the correct one to be the champion. Since you appreciate performance so much (I also do), let the tied players play more rounds! Lightning playoffs are a better tiebreaker than any numerical hairsplitting wonder. We both want to see the players play, so let them play and it will be a great excitement to see those 5 min thinking times games! Any congress schedule can bear that!

Let me tell you 21st time that if that is about to happen, we know that before hand and we can use wildcard option.

Which wasn't my point. My point was using a condescending tone is unnecessary and damages people's opinion of you.



Someone capable of winning the European title.



The OP's



That is a subjective definition of very good. I have never read an objective definition of "very good" that means "no change required". It is also not enough of a superlative to mean "no improvement is possible".



I agree, but to me improving this system is much more important than tiebreaker semantics. Finding a way of collecting individual views from those most relevant to impact the future of the system is important



Your original comment was EGC, which I saw as the European Go Congress rather than the European Championship. The change makes my original comment not relevant.



That was a bizarre championship that does not accurately reflect typical trends.



Pot. Kettle. Black. You've seen the trend of those 8 years, so you choose to cite a championship which I excluded because the data was not ordered on the EGD. Having now taken the extra time to investigate, I find a tournament with only 6 European 6d players, and no 7d players or professionals. It's an extreme end due to non-participation of really strong players, and in this particularly case the 5d may well have found himself in the supergroup even if it was only 16 players (including foreigners). To use this as evidence that the supergroup should be big enough to include 5d players is horrendous statistical manipulation.



If I extend my comment to state "... not title contenders where 7 dan + players were present", can you still show it to be wrong?



And if you include 2001, where the figures of EU 6-7d+ is 6, and no non-EU 7d+, leaving the smallest speculated supergroup size out of the entire dataset.



Forged statistics? I have looked at the last 8 years and you cherry pick a single carefully chosen year to refute it - your forgery is the greater I'm afraid. Also, your example year of 2001 supports the case also, as the supergroup would naturally have to include 5d players because of the lack of strong participation.



I didn't ask about 5 dans, I asked about the total number. In your exceptional example, the 5d would be in the supergroup without it being big. The number still requires justification.

SOS etc. are neither fair nor unfair - they are unpredictable. Playing lightning playoffs is a fair tiebreaker because the players' own performance is measured directly.



Dynamic rounds are NOT a tiebreaker but enable the first result criterion (NumberOfWinsScore or MMS) to prevail!



This should a very bad attitude of yours towards the first result criterion.



What matters is
- strength distribution of players
- number of rounds
- objective of whether to be sure to have a possible strongest players in



Rather than the number of rounds being irrelevant, it is also relevant. That there is some interdepence to strength distribution of players does not imply that it would be an identity of cause.



For the first few rounds, there seems to be agreement among experts that fold is not the best.



For later rounds, why should fold not be as good or better?



LOL

Wrong.

Entertainment for the kyu player about the EC comes from watching EC players, games or results. (Maybe for some also from boasting to have also played in the EC.)

For this entertainment, it would be better of main tournament and EC would be at different times so that kyu players could see more of the EC (top) games. That kyu players have a shorter thinking time helps them only partially.

However, experience tells us that only very few do watch top games live. Between 0 and 10 in room 1. Maybe one or two dozen in a video room. What does attract kyus much more is live commenting; then the rooms are full. However, they are fuller during afternoon commenting!

So although the live entertainment does play a role, it is a small role. On average, less than 10% watch live. Maybe you are an exception as much as I am (I watch rather a lot live). Such exceptions are too rare to play a significant role though.

A wildcard would very unlikely have identified Kulkov. Instead they would have chosen van Zeijst or whomever. Politicians are weak at predicting playing strengths well!