Potential European champion paradox

[RobertJasiek]

I maintain that, after the seeding to the KO, the KO (except for the losers' games) is a good (but not the best; pretty much the best possible for a 3 games in 3 days system) system for determining the European Champion.

The seeding to the KO is a good compromise and - given the schedule and other requirements - about as good as it can be. (Minor improvements would be possible.)

The coexistence of EC and EOC is a compromise - good in some respects, less good in others.

[topazg]

In general, in a tournament, you mark off a section of time in which players compete, and strive to make it so that the player who performs the best wins. If Simara manages to beat Ilja tomorrow, that expectation will be badly violated. Ilja will have faced much stronger competition, while winning more games against them, and even beating Simara once in the process. Yet Simara will be the champion, since this last game is weighted more heavily than the others. It will become obviously implausible to claim that this tournament selects the best performing European player.

If that's your criteria for the tournament, that's what you set. I know of very few tournaments that are based on performance rather than results within a set of constraints (for example, in Chess, where "effective performance" is frequently calculated, it's never more important than academically interesting). In a knockout, he who doesn't lose, wins. Over the course of the knockout, Jan Simara never lost an overall match, therefore performed the best in the section of the tournament that decided on the winner.

I don't see the paradox. Most group + knockout tournaments have a "play well enough to reach the knockout" phase and a "don't lose any more" phase, they don't reward the team or individual who netted the most points / goals, conceded the least etc over the course of the tournament, as that's not the purpose of the format.

The whole point of a knockout format is that the winner is the champion, therefore whoever wins the final is the champion. No one ever makes a serious claim that the champion of sport is the best player in the field at that given time, whether it's chess, go, football or anything else. If you want "best player", you probably have to refer to ratings tables. The champion is just that, no more, no less.

[hyperpape]

Topazg, you are importing too much baggage into the notion of performance. One notion of performance is effective performance incorporating other ratings. One other, simpler, notion of best performance is "most wins". An ordinary knockout or Swiss both use this metric (except for bands and tiebreaks and all that in a Swiss--knockout is cleaner but has other costs).

It's worth noting that in a properly seeded knockout, you have an expectation that the best player in terms of effective performance will be the best player in terms of the official criterion for the winner. This can fail, of course, if there are enough upsets that are properly distributed, but the hurdle that the winner has no losses and all other players have losses is substantial.

On the plus side, a knockout is simple to understand, and you do not have to worry about artifacts introduced by initial ratings that would appear if you tried to measure effective performance directly.

A tournament happens at a designated time. Unlike ratings, it is not designed to answer the question "who is the best player" but "which player did the best in this week's competition." On that criterion, I think the European system works poorly.

[topazg]

Topazg, you are importing too much baggage into the notion of performance. One notion of performance is effective performance incorporating other ratings. One other, simpler, notion of best performance is "most wins". An ordinary knockout or Swiss both use this metric (except for bands and tiebreaks and all that in a Swiss--knockout is cleaner but has other costs).

Aren't we both? Simara performed the best in the knockout, and therefore deserves to win as that was the part of the tournament that determined the champion? Performance in previous stages is therefore irrelevant with regards to assigning the champion, no?

A tournament happens at a designated time. Unlike ratings, it is not designed to answer the question "who is the best player" but "which player did the best in this week's competition." On that criterion, I think the European system works poorly.

Are you sure? It strikes me that it the European Championship tournament is designed to answer the question "who, out of those that qualified for the knockout stage, performed the best from that point onwards" - on that criterion, I think it does rather well

FWIW, I actually disliked the format from the very first moment it was suggested. All the kerfuffle and issues with foreigners taking part in the EGC and so on I never really understood. As far as I'm concerned, the European Champion can be the highest scoring person in the EGC that is eligible for the title. Sure, who the top players get drawn against can affect it if the top 3 players in the open are all foreign, but I consider that a smaller negative than a knockout format, which to me only has the benefit of being generally quicker and clear.

I would still say that the format is not particularly well thought through, and previously the format seemed a better reflection of the performance overall throughout the week if that's what the organisers were wishing to reward, but with the current format the way it is, the actual result seems inherently fair to me.

[hyperpape]

You can always specify some sufficiently gerrymandered achievement that a tournament is designed to recognize, and by that criterion, the tournament will always be a pretty good design. My point of view is that there are some general constraints on how a tournament should select a winner, and there's room for debate among those, but that this tournament doesn't do an especially good job of meeting them.

You look at the event, and it looks like a nine round McMahon tournament is its centerpiece. They're playing for nine days with some breaks in between.

Fun test: go to the webpage, look under congress > main tournaments, and try to find some indication that the European knockout even exists. You'll find a big fat table for a McMahon tournament at (http://www.egc2012.eu/congress/main-tournaments/open-european-championship/results-main-tournament-round-9). This seems to have been very dumb of me.

Anyway, the tournament had the rules that it had, Simara is the winner, but I think there's tons of room to criticize those rules.

[HermanHiddema]

Well, you might at least look at the results after round 10, instead of round 9:

http://www.egc2012.eu/congress/main-tou ... 10-results

In this list, Shikshin is 3rd, Simara is 5th (and they are 1st and 2nd European) Shikshin has 1 win more, but of course Simara's extra game win on Wednesday is not included

Also, at the main page for the main tournament:

http://www.egc2012.eu/congress/tourname ... ampionship

There is a knock-out table for the European Championship.

Also, the front page has a news item that Simara is champion.

[hyperpape]

I copied and pasted the old link, without paying attention to it. As for what happened when I looked at the Congress website, I have no idea how I botched that. Thank you for a rather patient response.

[topazg]

You can always specify some sufficiently gerrymandered achievement that a tournament is designed to recognize, and by that criterion, the tournament will always be a pretty good design. My point of view is that there are some general constraints on how a tournament should select a winner, and there's room for debate among those, but that this tournament doesn't do an especially good job of meeting them.

You look at the event, and it looks like a nine round McMahon tournament is its centerpiece. They're playing for nine days with some breaks in between.

Fun test: go to the webpage, look under congress > main tournaments, and try to find some indication that the European knockout even exists. You'll find a big fat table for a McMahon tournament at (http://www.egc2012.eu/congress/main-tournaments/open-european-championship/results-main-tournament-round-9). This seems to have been very dumb of me.

Anyway, the tournament had the rules that it had, Simara is the winner, but I think there's tons of room to criticize those rules.

I'll be honest, my points are mostly pedantic, maybe I just had a bad day

I happen to agree with you that I find it very dissatisfactory as a way of resolving the tournament, but I wouldn't call it wrong or unjust because I don't see any way how justice or right-ness applies beyond that of an application of the rules. The rules were well known by all at the beginning I suspect.

I'd love to see the champion title being given to the highest placed European in the main tournament, but as that got rejected out as a way of doing it within the last 24-36 months, I can't see it coming back any time soon sadly.