2003 WORLD TEAM TANTRIX CHAMPIONSHIP
HOW THE DRAW WILL WORK
The seeding bands have now been published at http://tournaments.tantrix.co.uk/results/03wttcsl.htm
and the draw will take place in the www.tantrix.com
game lobby - probably in a game/chat room – look for the one that’s full of
people!
Triple
control:
As usual, three people will be involved – this time it will be Zoltán Németh
(“Zormac”) from Hungary drawing the tiles
without knowing which teams or groups they represent and Steven Trezise (“steven2”)
from the UK knowing which tile numbers correspond to which teams or groups
but having sent the list to Dave Dyer (“ddyer”) from
the USA before the draw so that nothing can be changed during or after the draw.
Keeping
teams from the same country apart:
The need to achieve dual objectives this time,
i.e.
a) to ensure that one team from each
seeding band ends up in each group
b) to ensure that only one team A, B, C
or D from each country is in any one group in order to keep the tournament feeling
very international for everyone
… means that the draw will be more complex than
usual. As a result, it may look like we are making the draw up as we go along
but in reality it has been planned in advance!
It should be clear to everyone watching the draw which team is ending up
in which group, even if they have not read what follows, but to prove that
there is a system behind the draw and
to give those of you who like to understand these things in more detail a
chance of following what is going on, here is a description of how the draw will
work and why.
It
all sounds very complicated, but it isn't really J
Zoltán will always be drawing from tiles 1-4 or a subset thereof.
All of the randomisations
mentioned below (and any that aren't mentioned below but might be necessary)
will be emailed to Dave Dyer in advance of the draw.
Seeding
Band 1:
The no. 1
and 2 seeds NZL A and GBR A have automatically been placed in into Groups A and
D respectively.
Zoltán will
then draw from tiles 1 and 2 to find out which team goes into Group B -
one will be HUN A and the other FRA A, at random, as
assigned by Steven and sent to Dave before the draw.
Seeding
Band 2:
What we won’t do and why …
Moving onto
seeding band 2, if we started with four tiles in the bag and NZL B was the
first to be drawn (i.e. into Group A, NZL A's group) then we could either say:
a) NZL B
automatically goes into the next group
b) the NZL B tile is replaced in the bag and another tile is drawn
The problem
with a) is that Group B would then have twice as much chance of getting NZL B
than Groups C or D, which is unfair, and the problem with b) is that Zoltán would then know which tile number was NZL B
when drawing the other groups, so he could theoretically make sure that HUN A
avoided them. I'm not for a moment suggesting that he would cheat like this,
but people could claim that he did if the draw went HUN A’s way, which is
exactly what we are trying to avoid by using the "three independent
people" method for doing the draw.
What we will do …
Instead of us using a) or b)
above, Zoltan will first draw from tiles 1 to 3 to
find out which group NZL B goes into (i.e. B, C or D) with each tile
representing a different group (randomised) and then he will put tiles 1 to 43 back in the
bag and draw from them again with each tile representing a different team (randomised) to find out which of GER A, AUS A and
USA A goes into groups A and then into the two other unfilled groups.
The remaining seeding bands:
I will
continue to apply this kind of logic to the rest of the draw. When there is
more than one 'lower' team in a seeding band, it might not always be possible
to get around the problem of some groups having more chance of getting a
certain team than others, but it looks like there will always be one method/order
of doing the draws for each seeding band that will cearly
be fairer than any of the others.
So,
what I will do for the remaining seeding bands is to send Dave as many
different randomisations of the 4 teams / groups as
we could possibly need for that seeding band, and then use them in strict
sequence.
Seeding
Band 3:
For seeding
band 3, I will first ask Zoltán to discard the tiles
that represent GBR B and GBR C in SB3 randomisation
no. 1 and then I will ask him to draw from the remaining two tiles to find out
which team goes into GBR A's group.
If he draws
AUS B to go into Group D, I will ask him to discard whichever tile represents
AUS B team in SB3 randomisation 2 and draw from
the remaining three tiles to fill the other groups.
If he draws
FIN A to go into Group D, we will have to draw from a 2-tile set (GBR B and GBR
C) to see which team ends up in AUS A's group before drawing from the remaining
two teams.
Of course,
in the less likely but still very possible event that AUS A had ended up in Group
D when SB 2 was drawn, FIN A will automatically have to go in Group D with GBR
A and AUS A and the other three groups can then be filled completely at random.
Seeding
Band 4:
The
sequence of draws for SB 4 is highly dependent on which of the higher teams
have ended up in which groups, so there are too many possible permutations to
list here.
However, I
will always tell the people watching exactly which teams or groups Zoltán is drawing
from (and tell him which tiles he should use) to avoid any ambiguity, and I
will have sent Dave enough randomisations for this
seeding band to cope with any eventuality.
We might
need to do SB 4 slower than the other SBs to make
sure that I don't mess it up and end up with one team left and one group left
which contains another team from the same country!
Seeding
Band 5:
I don't see
any good arguments for keeping GDL A and the FRA teams apart when GDL have
chosen to be a separate team (as they are for the Americas-only international
football competition - I found this out when looking for an unofficial GDL flag
to use for bodhran in the Pan-Am and it is the
loose precedent I am using to allow them to have a separate team!), so SB 5
will have a straight draw from tiles 1-4 to fill each group in turn.
Seeding
Band 6:
A bit more
complicated (and again there are so many permutations depending on where FIN A,
HUN A, and HUN B end up that I won't list them all here) but the fact that GBR
E isn't restricted (because it can't avoid all
of GBR A-D anyway) will make it simpler than SB 4.
This
all sounds very complicated, but it isn't really - I just have to be careful to
get the sequence of the draws within each seeding band right and Zoltán just has to pick from whatever subset
of tiles 1, 2, 3 & 4 I ask him to draw from each time.
KO
draw:
Someone
complained during a recent tournament that I had left the KO draw ambiguous by
not specifying on the group summary page that the winner of QF1 would play
the winner of QF2 in one SF and the winner of QF 3 would play the winner of QF
4 in the other.
Silly me had thought that was obvious, especially since it had
been the case in all previous tournaments. Funnily enough the person in
question got the SF opponent they had probably been dreading then won the match
(and the tournament) anyway! :-)
However, to
avoid any ambiguity, the QF pairings will be A1 v C2, B1 v D2
(the two winners to play in one SF), C1
v A2 and D1 v B2 (the
two winners to play in the other SF) with (just in case anyone is still
unclear) the SF winners meeting in the Final and the SF losers meeting in the
3/4 playoff. A1 means the team that finished 1st in Group A, etc.