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 Post subject: Balancing colours
Post #1 Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2016 10:21 am 
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Suppose we have a 3/2 round robin tournament: first we play a round robin of all players and then round a robin within the upper half (and possibly also within the lower half). Let's assume 8 players. After the first round robin it is possible to balance colours. One way is to use opposite colours within the second round robin. This may result that some players fail to get 50-50 colours. Another way is to attempt to make all players' colours balnec as close to 50-50 as possible, but this may result that two player play twice with same colours. Which way do you prefer?

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 Post subject: Re: Balancing colours
Post #2 Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2016 10:57 am 
Oza

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If the first round is a round-robin, then everyone has already played one game against each possible future opponent, so it's certainly possible to have everyone switch colours within a particular pairing. As you said, though, the colour balance may not turn out 50-50 for each player depending on how the round robin split works out, e.g. all the winning players won all their games as black, but only some of the games as white.

I suppose the question is also whether the first and second rounds should be treated as a single entity or separate ones. If they're the same entity, it makes sense that you switch colours against a given opponent the second time around, while if they're two separate ones, it would make sense to aim for a 50/50 colour balance.

Based on the very brief synopsis, I'm inclined to treat them as separate entities. That is, there was a preliminary round robin tournament, and the results of that dictated seeding into the second tournament. Particularly because everyone has already played each other once, the first round feels complete as it is, so I think the second round's colours should be independent of it.

However, if you're trying to create more of a rematch or continuous feel, switching colours according to the previous game would lend to that atmosphere by directly tying something from the first round into the second. This might work if the tournament results were determined by the combination of first and second round results, or at least all of the first round results against players in the same 2nd round group being included in the second round results.

That said, a complete round robin tournament is already going to take quite a while to resolve with more than a handful of players, so why have two rounds in the tournament?

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 Post subject: Re: Balancing colours
Post #3 Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2016 3:04 am 
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My intention was to count the wins from both round robins as a final score.

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 Post subject: Re: Balancing colours
Post #4 Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2016 8:09 am 
Oza

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Are people in the second pool of the second round automatically ranked lower than those in the first pool at the end? I think more than the colours, it may be perceived as unfair if, say, there are a couple 4-4 people who split between pools on tiebreakers, and the one in the weaker pool goes on to win all their games against the presumably weaker competition to end 8-4 and take a high place in the full tournament.

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 Post subject: Re: Balancing colours
Post #5 Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2016 10:48 am 
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skydyr wrote:
Are people in the second pool of the second round automatically ranked lower than those in the first pool at the end? I think more than the colours, it may be perceived as unfair if, say, there are a couple 4-4 people who split between pools on tiebreakers, and the one in the weaker pool goes on to win all their games against the presumably weaker competition to end 8-4 and take a high place in the full tournament.

If there would be a second pool at all, it would be lower than the first pool.

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 Post subject: Re: Balancing colours
Post #6 Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2016 1:16 pm 
Gosei

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In Go it is not clear that there needs to be colour balancing, unlike Chess, where you have to have it. Why not just use Nigiri?

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 Post subject: Re: Balancing colours
Post #7 Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2016 3:14 am 
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Javaness2 wrote:
In Go it is not clear that there needs to be colour balancing, unlike Chess, where you have to have it. Why not just use Nigiri?

Unimportance of colour balancing is not a reason to avoid it. Then you just don't have to care so much how to do it. I tend to prefer the method to give pairs opposite colours in the second round robin compared to the first one.

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