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
by Matt | March 21st, 2008
It’s March. Have you filled out your brackets yet?
While the NCAA’s Division 1 Tournament garners most of the attention (and with Cinderella stories like George Mason’s 2006 run, there’s a reason), another large Division I college basketball tournament is underway.
The National Invitation Tournament, despite pejorative nicknames such as the “Not Invited Tournament”, is an interesting case study in the setup and execution of a single elimination tournament. How big should a single elimination tournament get? Are multiple play-in rounds helpful or degrading? How should at-large bids be decided and seeded? The NIT has wrestled with each of these questions, and has come up with a tournament process, for better or worse.
As of 2007, the NIT is a single-elimination tournament, made up of four brackets with eight teams each, but this has not always been the case. Between 2002 and 2006, an eight team play-in round was introduced to determine who would earn the four eighth-seeds. This round has been eliminated; after all, who wants to play a round where victory rewards you with losing to a number one seed? March Sadness, indeed.
Seeding is determined through a combination of automatic bids and at-large bids. But before the NCAA bought the rights to the NIT in 2005, the at-large bid process was plagued by charges of corruption. ESPN, which televised the tournament, held contractual rights to select the teams accepted into the NIT, and schools in large television markets (such as the University of New Mexico) would consistently earn bids. To ensure the tournament has integrity, this clause was eliminated, and seeding is determined by a committee of former NCAA coaches, transparently.
So check out the “Little Dance” this year. Maybe next year you can start an NIT pool.
by Zach | February 3rd, 2008
Picking your tournament type is a delicate decision. You have to balance three key issues to maximize competitor enjoyment: competition level, number of matches played, and administrative resources (duration of tournament, officiating staff, courts and fields).
And never before has their been a worse tournament type at balancing these issues than Single Elimination. One loss and you’re out, el fin. There are no second chances. Even the best and highest seeded team in a tournament can have a bad match. But your job as a tournament director is to guarantee that the best team is the team that wins first place.
Is a single loss a significant enough factor to state without variability or doubt that a losing team is not indeed the best team? As Tournologists, we would say no. But we’re not here to make that decision for you. We’re here to provide you with the tools to make that decision for yourself.
Quick Reference:
- Length: One of the shortest tournament types, will eliminate teams quickly and leave them hungry for more matches. This tournament type has fewer teams playing with every round that goes by. Works best as a second-phase to a qualification round, usually a Round Robin.
- Size: Works best with a number of competitors that is a power of two, so that you don’t have a lot of byes (a match in which one team has no opponent and wins automatically). So tournament sizes of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 teams, et cetera. The closer to the power of two without going over will minimize the amount of byes. So, a tournament with 15 teams will have much fewer byes than a tournament with 17 teams. For that reason, many tournament directors find it easier to truncate down a tournament when they’ve gone over a power of two, rather than attempt to add teams to reach the next power of two.
- Examples: National Football League post-season. NCAA College Basketball March Madness.
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