TANTRIX TOURNAMENT MASTER TITLES – 1. THE ISSUES

Please note that this article was written in 2002 so parts of it may now be out of date. In particular, the criteria for obtaining the lobby master title have been tightened up significantly, so some of the comments about them no longer apply. The problems being experienced with the lobby master titles back then are relevant though , because they were a significant factor in prompting us to take action to tighten up the tournament titles even further.

As you know, it has always been possible to become a tournament master by getting three 'norms' (i.e. 2000+ performances in single tournaments involving a total of 7 or more games against 4 or more different opponents) and an overall rating above 1900. Originally these were to be called ITMs or international tournament masters.

The grand master title (TGM) was intended to be introduced at a later date (when the Elo ratings had evolved further and we had enough information to be sure that we were setting the TGM bar high enough that it recognised only truly exceptional performance both now and far into the future) but was actually introduced last year for reasons linked to the introduction of the lobby master title - see 1.2 below.

For various reasons (described in the intro section below), we felt that we had to take a long-term view of the tournament master titles and make sure that we were not setting up something that was likely to cause problems in the future.

You can safely skip the intro if you were involved in the initial discussions about this - skip to section 2 which can be found on this page.

Apologies in advance if it sounds like we have been getting too worked up over the details of all this or trying to make this all seem more important than it actually is. Maybe Tantrix will never become as huge as other popular strategy games, but it might. In case it does, we think that we must try to be responsible and think about the potential implications of decisions like this and resist any temptation to just do what suits us best now and leave future players to clear up the mess.

1. INTRO FOR THOSE NEW TO THIS ISSUE:

1.1 Why weren't you included in the loop on this issue before?

Discussions on tournament Elo rating issues tend to be limited to existing tournament controllers, since they are the group most likely to take an interest and should have enough experience to be objective.

No doubt other players could have some very good input too, but once we go outside that obvious 'expert' group it would be hard not to open the discussion to everyone. I know from experience that this inevitably provokes more comments based on pure self-interest (NB. this comment is almost certainly NOT aimed at anyone reading this!) than the considered and thoughtful comments that are most helpful. If I had to deal with dozens of comments like that, we'd never get anywhere and I'd never have time for anything else!

1.2 What prompted us to re-look at tournament master titles?

When Mike introduced lobby masters, I could see the aim behind it and that it might be a motivational factor for some players, but many of us were very uneasy about a master title being set up where the main criterion for qualification was based on the lobby rankings and which was thus easiest to meet by playing robot games and weaker players.

Unfortunately, those fears have proved to be pretty well founded and, as many people have pointed out, any person and their dog can now become lobby masters if they really want to, which could have a very damaging effect on the long-term perception of any type of Tantrix master title. (Strangely some of the strongest tournament players haven't made it yet - maybe because they take TGs seriously but play lobby games mainly for fun)

To be fair to the lobby master title, it does seem to motivate some of the keen-but-not-that-strong players to play a lot more games to try to get above 950, the master rankings themselves do solve some (though not all) of the problems inherent in the lobby rankings and the loudest complaints they provoke in the lobby seem to often involve spurious reasons / misunderstandings rather than being aimed at any real weaknesses.

Anyway, I am only writing about the lobby masters like this because it is the easiest way to explain why we know we MUST think to the future as regards tournament masters and not risk creating similar problems.

1.3 Why did ITMs becomes TGMs late last year?

As a result of my initial fears about the lobby masters, I agreed with Mike that we would upgrade the tournament master title to TGM straightaway to make it more obviously different. This was just at the point where Matt Peek became the first player to qualify. I would have been the second player to qualify after this year's Euro win.

1.4 Was I too hasty?

In some ways, yes, though obviously the TGM master title was never likely to be in danger of becoming as easy to achieve as the lobby master title. In spite of that, some people have been getting a bit concerned that we might now have a system which could open the TGM floodgates at a later date. For example, one day there might be a lot more online tournaments and/or one day there might be smaller offline tournaments somewhere in the world every other weekend.

We all know the dangers of trying to take away titles retrospectively or just as people achieve them (unless you take them away from yourself, and even that FEELS hard - see below!) , so if we claimed to have the long-term interests of competitive Tantrix at heart, we HAD to try to think to the future now and preferably sort something out before this year's WTC.

1.5 Were any other issues involved?

To complicate matters further, it had become clear that it is much harder to gain a norm from longer tournaments (like most of this year's major championships) than in shorter tournaments like those played in 1999 and shorter tournaments played nowadays. This is not that surprising because it is obviously harder to sustain a really exceptional performance level over a high number of games. e.g. in a 16-game tournament you could sustain a 2000 performance over the first 8 games and only play at 1970 for the last 8 games and not get a norm, whereas if they had been two separate 8-game tournaments, you would have got a norm for the first one.

This is not a problem as far as overall Elo ratings are concerned (you would end up with the same overall rating of 1975 over 16 games in either case) but it IS a problem as far as norms are concerned when these are awarded based on performance in a single tournament.

There are all kinds of theoretical and practical problems associated with awarding norms for partial tournaments, so it was clear that some kind of allowance for the number of games in each tournament was needed. The adjustment we arrived at after careful consideration and analysis of past figures (to be applied retrospectively in order to be fair) was to allow a norm to be awarded for performances of 1950 and above as long as the single tournament rating plus the number of games in the tournament was still 2000 or above.   e.g. 1970 is enough if you play 30 or more games in the tournament. The other safeguards - at least 7 games in the tournament against 4 or more different opponents - would still apply.

This, though, made us even more concerned about whether we were making it too easy to become a TGM over the long term.

Section 2, which includes our conclusions, full details of the new tournament master qualification standards and some implications for the future can be found on this page.