BBALLs Cup TO's Trip Report

[ooarrtracter]

Last weekend I ran the BBALLs Cup, a 1 day team tournament in London. I did a couple of non-standard things at the event to see how they went so here is a self review of how they worked. Perhaps this will come useful for anyone considering some of the ideas for their tournaments.

Tournament Type
The event was a team tournament for teams of 3. Not new in general what with World Cup, Eurobowl, UKTC et al but I don't think there are (m)any one day team events. Teams of 3 worked well for a small (in terms of both time and number of teams) event and I wouldn’t want to go bigger for this. As those of you who’ve done team tournaments know it generates a great sense of camaraderie within the room and I must say it was a very pleasant addition and I highly recommend anyone who hasn’t been to a team event to go to one.

Pros: Team tournaments are awesome, Great atmosphere, Change from standard solo
Cons: Takes a little more organising/stress to round out last spots, Odd number of teams would have been awkward with teams of 3

Accelerated Swiss
The biggest difference at the event was that I used Accelerated Swiss for the draw. Although this was not at all necessary in terms of finding an outright winner for the size of event it did still have some benefits for potentially matching more ‘serious’ players sooner than standard swiss.

The seeding was done based on the BBALLs Shield tournament series scores. This meant the seeding was on this years form rather than historical rankings. This was probably of a benefit for this tournament because there are still a lot of relatively new NAF coaches in London who would possibly be unfairly penalised by an ELO based system. London tends to not get too many external visitors for 1 day events so this seemed reasonable. This did mean the team of ne’er-do-wells who pitched up in their matching shirts with almost no series points were unseeded. This was both a negative, as they were very arguably the strongest side there, but also a positive as if a seeded team were to get a draw when they did play, in theory they’d have a stronger result overall. This would possibly be a fair reward for going to lots of London events whilst still not being an unfair power skew for unseeded sides.

If you looked at the results then you’ll see that the aforementioned unseeded team did indeed win by winning all 4 matches. Although their earlier rounds were in theory easier at the end of the day they proved themselves by beating everyone put in front of them. However the hypothesis would have been correct as if The Pirates had drawn R4 (which was on the cards until quite late on) with them they would have won on SoS.

Trying to ignore actual results due to small sample size and just concentrate on the fixture distribution you can see that the top 3 finishing seeded sides all faced almost exclusively opponents from the top half of the table. This is exactly what Accelerated Swiss aims to do so it appears to work exactly as expected. The fact that an unseeded side was also able to win prevents a mis-categorisation to adversely affect a coaches chances like McMahon would.



As an additional note, rather than the traditional 1st, 2nd and 3rd I distributed the prizes as Overall winner and Unseeded winner (unless you won, in which case it went to 2nd place). This meant that even if you were unseeded and not ‘incorrectly’ so you weren’t excluded from any potential prize if you did well enough. In this case it was 1st & 2nd but it could be very different were seeded sides to dominate.

Pros: Top few sides played other top sides more often, Unseeded side not prevented from winning both overall and in general
Cons: Incorrectly unseeded side can have an easier run of fixtures, Careful thought needed to seed sides suitably prior to event to prevent potential mis-categorisation

Tournament Software
As I was running a team tournament and wanted the increased functionality of the Accelerated Swiss I decided to use Sann’s ExScore to run the event. Without using this I don’t think I would have been able to leverage the first two rounds as Score does not give the functionality to adjust draws easily. With ExScore I knew I could manually tweak the team matchups and then have the software re-draw the individual fixtures for me.

Admittedly with a low number of teams the first two rounds were 80% manual draw. For the first round I just swapped any instance where an unseeded team was playing a seeded one and it was still effectively random. In the second round I took the initial ordering list of teams and added the bonus points on. I could then manually run down the list and match the pairs based on this and trusting the tiebreakers were managed for me. The 3rd round onwards was a normal draw so worked smoothly.

If this were to be run on a larger scale a proper method of running this draw would definitely be needed. Both in terms of being able to handle the manual draw and in general use I found the software worked excellently It even managed to cope with the instance the wrong pairs within a team matchup played and took the switch of coaches smoothly. The only other missing element as far as I was concerned was my odd tiebreakers not in the functionality.

Pros: Ran very smoothly, Greater draw flexibility than Score, Some elements of tournament structure much easier to implement
Cons: Can be intimidating if not au-fait with Excel & something goes a little wrong, Needs Windows Excel to run

Rules Pack
For completeness I include the rulespack here, although possibly less of interest to other parties. This was the first one I did on my own, Pearlies is just a tweak of the Ironmanji set, so was interesting to see how it went.

The base skills were pretty standard, if a skill short from normal rule sets. Due to concerns about the bonus packs (see in a moment) the tiering ended up very shallow so Tier 1 was probably over preferred by the package (57% of teams were Tier 1). I’m not totally against this as this was supposed to be the final event of a year long tournament series so people bringing their A game is theoretically a good thing.
Having said that due to the bonuses & team restrictions there was still quite a range of races, 20 of the 27 allowed (UnderGobs were a separate Tier than Underworld) from 42 coaches.

For the bonuses I had 3 aims I wanted to hit; Be suitable powerful as they’re a bonus, have suitable downsides so they were all balanced, be fluffy to match the 4 London groups that make up the BBALLs.
Part 3 I think was a total success, perhaps slightly to the detriment of the balance. Particularly for the TalkNuffle bonus (+AG, AV changed to 6) I was wedded to the negative for fluff reasons so it was almost certainly ruled out for pieces with AV over 7. The other negatives were probably not all as bad so it was a little unbalanced.

In terms of balance the ECBBL bonus was by far the most popular as the negative was the least bad. In future this may want to be increased, possibly to -MA, to equal it up. The DBL reward was thought to be the most ‘broken’ prior to the tournament but didn’t have a huge takeup so this is still up for debate.

Pros: Had a good selection of teams represented, the bonuses were super fluffy, the DBL bonus was very unique and people who took it enjoyed it greatly
Cons: ECBBL bonus negative not balanced enough, Tier2 very underrepresented


So overall, I think that Accelerated Swiss definitely has application for events where you either want to have top coaches play each other more quickly or have more entrants than your number of rounds would allow a distinct winner from. It would definitely need software with the draw system built in though for large events as a manual process is too complex over 20 or so entrants.

I think I will definitely be running the BBALLs Cup again and would do so with Accelerated Swiss again, NAF approval pending of course.

I’d love to hear any opinions on anything to do with the tournament & format, and field any questions there may be about what I did.

[Wagz]

Lots of interesting analysis there, Rob, and honestly it was a very enjoyable and well-run event. I think the Accelerated Swiss system is a very good idea for a competitive event. I agree that the seedings needs consideration because, as you mention, the winning team was probably the strongest and was deserving of winning but they also had a potentially easier ride due to not being seeded. Maybe there only needed to be one round of accelerated seedings in a four round event; two in five feels right to me, as does one in three, and I think I'd hedge towards "just under half the rounds" as a rule of thumb. Probably it needs testing at other events to get a feel for things (individual events included) and there needs to be transparency in advance over how to become seeded (which you did give) but I think it would improve peoples' tournament experience across the board.

[PurpleChest]

I am aware some of my response may be coloured by my build being one i was really unhappy with and would not take again, though in the same circumstances i would take similar choices. I was also a bit luke warm pre tournament about attending at all and was slightly coming because i felt i should. But you have always run good tournaments and I do want to support 'London Scene'.

So:
I was in a team with 2 random others, one was a perfect gentleman and communicated well in the build up, both of us were prepared for the compromises we had to make to ensure our scratch pirates team would be legal, and would do so again. It meant we both compromised our first choices and felt other choices were ruled out. As someone that doesnt play in a league It is my own fault i suppose, but I felt at a disadvantage to those able to communicate pre-tournament. I do like team events though and this disadvantage is hard to overcome. Our third team member was perfectly pleasant on the day, and a nice guy and very good BB coach so the whole team thing worked out fine on balance.

I have always loved Team events (well, the 2 i have been two) before and am really really happy to see one in London, its a shame that the 'Team event' wasnt the USP imho, and I would love to see a London team event attract national and even international entrants. We are the capital of the Uk, home of BB, we have the best variety and most competitive transport from Europe and beyond. All the leagues represented will be going to the UKTC, why are our northern, welsh, scottish, middlander and assorted eurotrash friends not coming to London?

The accelerated Swiss I was confused by, I can understand the aim i suppose, and the maths of it and its implications, but it felt a little like punishment. I have no problem facing anyone at BB, and enjoyed the very tight competitive games a lot. But in all truth we faced a far harder schedule than the team that won. Though they deserved their win vs us and i wold not claim otherwise it felt a little counter-intuitive, I see your point about 'in general it seemed to achieve its aim', i guess i have never loved the aim.

The message being sent to me is to inveigle 2 BB playing mates not from london and submarine our way through next time, we'll have a better chance to win and I'll get more BBalls points (as a bonus I'd probably get first bonus choice).

Actually I wont do that, I try not to be that sort of guy. But i know some that would/might. Some people are munchkins and will do anything to win. And I do have some non London mates i play BB with at the UKTC, it is not unreasonable they might like to visit London some day and play BB. Perhaps you might have to 'do a wimbledon' as you say, and not use BBalls ranking as sole arbiter, though this would involve some deep NAF diving and i imagine would be time consuming if several non London players come to future events.

The tiers could certainly have been more giving i suppose but didnt seem too terrible to me in view of the possibly dominant league bonuses.

Having dipped my toe into three game days, i far prefer 4. the day was structured and run expertly and the venue is incredibly promising. It also had bacon, huge bonus marks there. from start to finish all communication and organisation was top notch.

The league bonuses: I wasnt a huge fan of the rule pack pre touney for this reason, and I wasnt sold on them. That said i have no problem with having a variety of rule sets, this was certainly different, and most people seemed to like them, so in view of all that im very undecided, odd for me, and not strongly for or against. I do wish it wasnt the same tourney as the Team event though, as i fear it will deter teams from outside BBalls.

Would I come again if run in its current format and ruleset: yes if free that day, but probably id bring a fun team i rarely play and just have a laugh.