Tantrix Tournament Reports

[steven]

The Elos for the top four are in the order in which they finished. It's quite unusual for the order to be this exact when the KO finalists did not win their groups, but the matches in the KO phase were decisive enough to ensure that it happened this time. All of the top four finishers except greenfox (who was the no. 1 seed and finished 4th) improved their overall ratings during this tournament, as did Malin whose score was better than statistically expected despite her finishing last in her group.

Although the Swedish Championship did not finish until mid-January (so would not normally be rated as if it were a tournament finishing in the previous month), it was supposed to be the 2007 Championship, so it seemed more sensible to treat this as a special case 2007 tournament and amend the end-2007 tables accordingly than to treat it as an early 2008 tournament.

We may need to manually adjust for this in future, though it would probably be preferable to try to get all rated tournaments in any given year finished by Christmas to avoid this anomaly if we can.

G. EloR Player

24 1916 luigi
21 1906 NiklasA
21 1892 Pellepen
24 1848 greenfox
12 1793 Nica
9 1664 Malle
9 1635 kashieda
12 1631 Luvan
12 1487 Simme

The only thing which might look a bit odd about the order is Malle getting a higher STC-only Elo than kashieda despite finishing below him in their group. This is because Malin had a significantly lower pre-tournament Elo than Jens, hence Jens had a lower AOR (average of opponents' rating) than Malin. Their TP%s were virtually identical (only 0.9 TPs separated them) so the difference in the amounts added to their AORs to get their ratings for this tournaments was only 8m uch less than the SOR difference.

In fact, three distinct factors have resulted in this apparent 'switch' being quite so marked in this case:

a) The fact that the difference in TP%s was so small.

b) The more than 100 point difference in their pre-tournament ratings.

c) The fact that there were only four players in the group, so they played 1/3 of their games in this tournament against each other - in larger groups, the player with the lower pre-tournament rating will still have a higher AoR, but the difference in averages will be smaller because AORs are averaged over more opponents.

However, it should be reassuring to note that in circumstances where this can happen, it is mathematically impossible for the lower-rated player to ned up with a higher overall rating because of it, all other things being equal. Indeed, Jens' overall rating was still nearly 90 ahead of Malin's after this tournament.

[Pellepen]

This year I really hope we are going to manage to get ready before Christmas.

There were a lot of circumstances that made the tournament running into January.

Tnx for you report Steven