Blog

Ben Drago

Last weekend I was in Paris for our first World Cup. It was a great weekend. We’re very happy with the event and are already working on plans for next year. I really enjoyed meeting a bunch of new players, and watching some great play. The deciding matches in both the semifinal matches were incredibly tight.

Now that I’m back in the office and working on my review, and I was just reading through some of the comments about this weekend and wanted to compare them to my list of things to improve for 2012.

Not enough teams from North America or Asia.

This one is the hardest to fix. We can’t fix that tickets are expensive, especially as discounted seats are getting harder and harder to find. We are doing a much better job announcing dates and locations early, which helps a bit. But ultimately you can’t “fix math” – travel across the ocean will never be cheap.

So we’re working on a schedule that will help out a bit. You’ll have to wait for details, but rest assured it’s at the top of my list.

Group play on Saturday decided by a single match.

One of our core philosophies towards tournament play is that the only time a tournament should be single-elimination is when it’s actually advertised as being single- elimination. There were a couple of groups where that happened, so it will absolutely be addressed for next year.

Currently I’m planning on taking the top two teams from each group, and playing the first knockout round on Saturday afternoon after group play is complete. This will make more matches matter, while also making sure that eight teams (24 players) can still play on something meaningful on Sunday.

We’re also looking at making the groups a bit bigger, so there are more round-robin matches. This is trickier, as it’s a balance on the number of teams that make it to group play as we have to have groups with an even number of teams, or else there’s a bye in every round.

That being said, there are a couple topics of conversation that we don’t consider to a problem. Here’s a couple of specifics:

Countries automatically making it to Day Two

This was a core requirement of the World Cup concept, and the tournament structure was designed around it so we have no intentions of changing it.

The traditional “big” tournament is pretty easy to manage. You run as many rounds as you can in 10-12 hours per day, take the top teams, and do it again. With software like Tracker, I could run these in my sleep.  There’s a few bits of polish, such as taking Day Two cuts so that everyone that makes it still has a shot at the Top Eight if they win all their matches. But otherwise the Swiss pairing system is pretty bulletproof, and we focus on making the tournament as smooth as possible.

We do this all the time. World Championships and Continental Championships use this tested structure. But a few times a year we want to break out of the mold and do something new, and the World Cup will be one of those times.

Day 1 performance “didn’t matter”

One of the limitations of Swiss is that difficulty to tune how much previous performance matters after cuts. In a normal tournament, the difference between moving on to Day Two at 9-0 vs 6-3 is huge.

Here’s a long and boring explanation of what we did. It was to balance Day One performance to make it meaningful but not overwhelming. I think it came pretty close – the difference between 9^th and 16^th place was over $1,000, so it certainly mattered.

We’ll probably keep the individual matches for Day One next year, and add prizes for the top finishers from Day One so that they get rewarded even if they’re team doesn’t keep up.

Next week I’ll be talking about Epic Cons, which I previewed in my podcast from Paris.