Tournology helps you coordinate and participate in any type of competition. Do you want to run a background check? Or, if you're feeling brave, take the plunge!

Kilometerstone! Tournology’s First Tournament

by Zach | October 7th, 2008

We’re very excited to announce that we have our nearing the deadline of our first project milestone: hosting our very own local tournament using a closed alpha version of Tournology! After many long weekends and after hours development, we’ve ready to let a few of the locals kick the tires on our project.

Pitchology, a local Pitch card game tournament, is set for November 22, 2008. We’ll be playing the Oklahoma Ten Point Pitch variety, a variant popular in our neck of the woods. Keep reading for the full ruleset.

Given the scale of participants this time around, we’ll be sending invitations to known interested parties. If you’d like to participate in future open tournaments, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed to be notified of new events and project status updates!

Pitchology will be a small tournament to grease the wheels on the core features: score entry and winner promotion. The Tournament will be a Round Robin split into two groups, with the top team from each group moving to a Single Elimination final playoff round.

For the pitch specialists in the audience, the house rules will be:

  • First to 52 points (Teams needn’t bid to win)
  • Negative scores shoot the moon to 0
  • There will be no time limits on rounds, but teams are asked to keep things moving along.

“…all players are dealt nine cards and everybody draws back to six cards. The winner of the bid will go through the undealt cards one at a time until the hand has six trump. The remaining cards are then given to the partner to go through. If the partner is full of trump, the remaining cards can be given back to the winner of the bid. If anyone has more than six trump in their hand, a non-point trump can be ‘buried’ on the first trick. If a player ends up with more than six point cards in their hand, the hand is considered a mis-deal.”
Source: Wikipedia

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Paralympic Games: Blind Football

by Zach | September 13th, 2008

Here at Tournology, we enjoy all classifications of competition, but sometimes we run across a sport that is particularly interesting, challenging, and really highlights a true competitive spirit. We’re talking about Football 5-a-side, taking place in the Paralympic Games 2008 in Beijing, China.

Photograph on The Boston Globe’s Big Picture Blog: Brazil vs Spain 2008 Beijing Football 5-a-side

Similar to Futsal, Football 5-a-side is played on a field smaller than a full size football pitch, but surrounded by walls to prevent the ball from going out of play. Each team has 4 field players and the goalkeeper, but the difference is: each field player has a visual impairment. The ball has special compartments with ball bearings inside [1] that emit noise to allow the players to track it, and each team also has a coach that serves as a guide, positioned behind the opponents goal to help target shots on goal. There are two twenty-five minute halves, with a penalty kick tiebreaker.

As with all Paralympic Sports, the difficulty is keeping the level of competition fair, as some disabilities are more severe than others. To solve this problem, the Paralympic Games use the idea of Classifications, which they describe as being no different than a weight class in wrestling, but for an athlete’s disability level. Football 5-a-side classifications allow for a maximum visual acuity of 6/60 and visual field of 20 degrees. Anyone less impaired than these classifications is not allowed to compete, and approved participants wear blindfolds during the match for the fairest competition (and are penalized for even touching these blindfolds during the match). The Goalkeeper may have full visual faculties, but must not be a registered professional in the last five years.

For the true Tournologists out there, the tournament structure of the event is a single group 6-team round robin, which determines the seeding for a final playoff match: 1 vs. 2, 3 vs. 4, and 5 vs. 6 to determine final rank and medals.

Check out the other amazing pictures from The Boston Globe’s Big Picture Blog: 2008 Summer Paralympic Games.

And here is a great video about the Chinese Paralympic Team:

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Olympic Inconsistency: The Medal Count

by Zach | August 24th, 2008

How does one rank a country’s achievement in the Olympics? There has been a bit of controversy lately with inconsistency in how rankings are organized for the Olympic Medal Count for the 2008 Summer Olympics in China. Namely, should the countries be organized by total medals won, or by Gold medals won?

The official results on the web site for the 2008 Summer Olympics orders participant countries by Gold Medals, with a separate (unusable) column for “Rank by Total.” The most active news outlet in the United States, NBC, has their rankings ordered by total medals won.

Some are calling shenanigans on American Media Coverage ordering results by total medals won, claiming bias towards placing the United States in the number one position, despite being behind China in gold medals won. Others argue that the statistic is “Medal Count,” not “Gold Medal Count.”

Let’s consult a Tournologist: Which ordering makes the most sense: Total Medals or Gold Medals?

Here, we have what Tournologists refer to as a “grey area.” Common sense dictates that a Gold Medal should be worth more than a Silver or Bronze Medal. But, how much more? Are two Silvers worth a Gold? A similar argument can be found in Round Robin tournament scoring (such as the English Premier League, a full double Round Robin tournament): How much better is a Win than a Tie? Many tournaments assign a point value of 3 to a win, and 1 to a tie, so three ties would equal the value of a win. A similar weighting could be applied to the medal ranking. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assign the respective weights for Gold, Silver, and Bronze to be 3, 2, and 1. This gives us a nice middle ground between the extremes, making Silver and Bronze medals worth more than almost nothing (as a tiebreaker), and less than everything (as the same value as a Gold). How would the top countries rank?

Country Weighted Gold Weighted Silver Weighted Bronze Weighted Total
China 51 * 3 21 * 2 28 * 1 223
United States 36 * 3 38 * 2 36 * 1 220
Russia 23 * 3 21 * 2 28 * 1 139
Great Britain 19 * 3 13 * 2 15 * 1 98
Australia 14 * 3 15 * 2 17 * 1 89

When looking at these rankings, one must also wonder: Is this representative of the “most athletic” country? As Tournologists, we would argue that the ranking is also biased towards countries that specialized in sports that reward the most medals, namely: Athletics (47 medals) and Swimming (34 medals). Some of the most popular sports in the world are underrepresented in medal counts, most notably Football (Soccer, 2 medals). Of course, most of this is rooted in the history and origin of the Olympics, but it is worth noting.

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