Talk Fantasy Football

How does it work? I mean exactly. Happy with it being used but when I think about how it works, I get confused and have to sit down

As I (barely) understand it, ties for a position are decided by the comparing final finishing positions of all opponents played.

Sounds great, but when I consider it, couldn't those opponents finishing positions change depending upon their strength of schedules?
This is where my brain melts. Please help!

ps apologies this post is hard to read/understand, but its hard to explain as I don't get it lol

In its simplest form (and how I understand Score does it):
(numbers made up for illustration purposes only)
Coach A 18 points
Coach B 16 points
Coach C 16 points
Coach D 12 points
Coach E 11 points
Coach F 10 points

Coach B’s opponents scored 22 points, Coach C’s opponents scored 21 points. So Coach B goes ahead of Coach C.
So it's not necessarily the final position, but the final score, of each coach that matters.

Make sense?

Yep, it's final points not final finishing positions. Otherwise it would be a circular reference, and thus brain melting

I still think it should be used throughout, not just applied in the last round (which is I think how most tournaments apply it).

sann0638 wrote:I still think it should be used throughout, not just applied in the last round (which is I think how most tournaments apply it).

On reflection and discussion I agree and will be testing it at Exiles Open this year with a view to using it like that next year.

Aha! so it was as simple as that. Sann's ''circular reference'' is a perfect description of why I was struggling to understand it

Thanks guys.

I haven't used Score so I don't know what it's capabilities are. But what about computing ELO? I know OBBLM uses it. Of course, I have no idea how it is calculated. And now that I think about it, in a Swiss-style tournament, you will in theory be continually playing someone near your rating so your ELO couldn't go up that much higher.

Forget I suggested it (still posting though...)

Strength of schedule (SOS) as I understand it's used in our context shouldn't be applied throughout because that would defeat one of the ideal objects of a tournament; namely the biggest games for the titles should come at the end.

SOS infers that the guy with the highest tiebreaker (opponent's score) has had the hardest time of it and played the best Blood Bowl to get to where he is, or is at least the most deserving. Of course; Blood Bowl is a dice game and random things happen, but in the perfect world, that's the principle. In an extreme, hypothetical example of eight coaches on equal points in round 4, if you then pair the guy with the best SOS (hypothetically the best or most deserving player) with coach 2 in round 4 (and as such, have the two guys who happen to have played Stunties, got lucky and rolled Blitz! a few times playing each other as their opponent score falls off a cliff on table 4), you just accelerate the effective final to round 4. The winner of table one has a progressively easier run to victory on day two, which isn't what we want. No-one wants to see Nadal v Federer on the first Friday of Wimbledon because they've done the best so far.

There was a post in the Eurobowl captain's section a while ago pointing out BB tournaments tend to use tie breakers incorrectly in the Swiss format anyway. Apparently, in other games / areas the format is used, players on the same number of points are effectively seeded to keep the better players apart (1 V 8, 2 v 7, etc.) until later in the tournament, be it with rankings or some other means. We tend to do it the wrong way around and pair 1 with 2. Luckily for us (to date) TDs and CAS have been arbitrary tie breakers pretty often, and they are so terrible at that job as to be essentially random. There is no rule that says the guy with more TDs is playing better than the guy with fewer (in many cases, the opposite of that is true), so it doesn't really matter when used as a breaker (sadly, occasionally you still see them pop up as proper tournament points rather than straight tie breakers, but that would be digressing to a different hobby horse). If you wanted to employ SOS this way (1 v 8, 2 v 7), I'd not have an issue, but I don't believe our current software allows you to do so (someone point out if I'm wrong, I'm not a whizz with Score!). You'd also have to think about BB being a dice game with lots of randomness in the real world anyway; so it's unlikely we'll ever know with certainty that coach 1 has played better Blood Bowl than 3, so these seedings are going to be far from perfect, infact no tie breaker is going to be. But on a point of principle, I could go for this.

Either way: words. I'm just happy SOS is becoming ever more prevalent. It may not be perfect for our game; but at least it rewards the coach who has, on paper at least, had the hardest time. Clocking up 6 touchdowns when you've drawn the 11 Snotling team with Wood Elves should only be rewarded once (with a win), not twice (with a then unbeatable tie breaker).

Just falls down if one of your opponents hasn't played all 6 games (for whatever reason).

Whilst that does happen, it's not common nor insurmountable enough to discard the best system. I'm sure within a couple of minutes you could come up with a few simple, fair workarounds. It's pretty straight forward, no?

Again, no arbitrary system is going to be perfect, so you may as well use the nearest one. My SOS being slightly off because one of my opponents has only played 4 games (and his score then being multiplied by 1.5) still seems a vastly better system to me than the guy using the Skaven finishing higher than me because the first tie breaker is TDs and I'm using Dwarves.

Thanks for the input Phil. On the one hand i am happy to have the challenge of getting score to di the seeding thing, on the other i am sad because i can't have a go this evening.

if you did 1v8 etc, presumably you would then apply straight sos at the end?

I suppose you would.

I'm no Swiss expert, and I'm far from best placed to suggest how it's best applied to Blood Bowl. It's never struck me as the perfect system, just the best we have.

Purplegoo wrote:still seems a vastly better system to me than the guy using the Skaven finishing higher than me because the first tie breaker is TDs and I'm using Dwarves.

Depends - if it was clear upfront what the tie-breaker was, and you choose to use a race that is penalised by tie-breaker I'd say that's you're own look out.

But of course. And if the tie breaker was tallest hat, if I came to an event with a flat cap and a whippet, I would not expect to come top on tie breakers.

The point was that we want tie breakers to reward the better Blood Bowl coach (I hope, or why bother with them?). And SOS is the best shot of that we have. Not TDs, CAS, hats or a dance off.

Anyway. Topic tangent complete.

Personally I think more tournaments should use a dance off as a tie breaker.

Purplegoo wrote:The point was that we want tie breakers to reward the better Blood Bowl coach

Agreed, but as has been pointed out, the better Blood Bowl coaches take the better rosters for the ruleset provided.
If you turn up at an event where the first Tie-break is Net TDs, and you've taken a 12 Dwarf Lineman roster with 6 Pass block skills you can't complain that someone who took Wood Elfs with Strip Ball, Block etc comes above you if you have the same points.

I'm not a huge fan of SoS as you can't do anything about it - you can only play the coach put in front of you. Hardly fair that if two coaches play the same 5 people, but for round 1 one randomly drew the guy that finished bottom whilst the other drew someone that came near the top.
Also, if using SoS all the way through an event (rather than just at the end) I think you'd have to disallow opponent swapping (as in club-mates, you shouldn't draw the same person again), especially near the top of the table.