Re: BBIV stuff

Kenny Peskin wrote:
"And under the
circumstances, I can't really blame him."

I'm going to
try to clarify things without being inflammatory. I
apologize if I step on anyone's toes.

The tiebreaker
system at BBIV was, as it has been at every GW
tournament I can remember, and as is as far as I know common
practice:
1) Overall record
2) Head-to-head victory
3)
TOTAL points scored

We chose not to have
anything to do with derived figures such as average
opposition points, opposition scored points, points created
-- after three years I'm still not sure what that is
-- or bonus conversion. The goal within a
round-robin is to rank the teams from 1 to n by comparing
them against one another in n rounds, making the
assumption that teams will perform, of themselves, equally
well in each round and that each round is of equal
difficulty. Therefore, the system of ranking listed above
represents the best means -- I remind people here that I'm
not a mathematician -- of comparing n teams over n-1
games. Of course, n-1 games to determine absolute rank
isn't statistically really that valid anyway.

I
should say in my own defense that although the
tiebreaking system wasn't shouted out at the opening meeting,
it was also by no means a secret. I simply assumed
that the method described above was now effectively
universal, as is "the winning team shall be the most
points."

With that out of the way, the exact nature of the
error was a fairly minute one: In copying scores from
the scoresheets to the master board of results, I
transposed "210-240" into "240-210" in -- I think it was the
Georgetown-Cornell round in the Darva bracket. The mistake was
entirely my fault, and I take full responsibility for its
ramifications. Fortunately, however, it was caught by players'
vigilance quickly enough; no game in progress was affected
(unless something happened that nobody told
me).

Of course, to those persons inconvenienced, I do
most sincerely apologize.

Edmund

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