Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Debacle and Diatribes

Ok, I have put this off long enough. The recent additional pie people shenanigans will have to wait. So its the second round of my first scrabble tournament. I get paired up with Peggy (gotta love driving for hours to play against people from your hometown). I ask her how her first round went and she tells me she won easily. I am... confused. If I lost and she won then how can we be paired with each other? In chess and magic (and every game/sport I know with tournaments from little league baseball to NCAA women's lacrosse) the fundamental rule of pairing is this: individuals/teams with the same record play each other. Sure there are tons of variations, but the basic concept remains the same. Warning Math-Like Mega Tangent The system I am most familiar with for relatively long tournaments is the swiss. This method is named after its place of origin and like the inhabitants of the land of chocolate, it is known for its fairness and neutrality. A simple example would be a group of eight players with preexisting ratings. Chess, magic and scrabble all use variants of the Elo system for ratings QuickyWiki ELO . Scrabble seems unfamiliar with the aphorism concerning ice cream and poop and has made some "improvements" to the system which I will cover in more detail another time. Suffice it to say that players are assigned numbers that correlate roughly to their ability and expected success rate. The higher the number, the better theoretically the player is and the more often they are expected to win. So if you have eight players with ratings ranging from 1800 to 1100 with convenient 100 point intervals between players a swiss system would dictate that you put the group in order from one through eight and then divide it in half between the fourth and fifth rated player. The top player in each half would then play each other and so on down the line (so 1800 vs 1400, 1700 vs 1300, 1600 vs 1200, and 1500 vs 1100). Ratings are useful tools for judging the strength of players and predicting future performance, but they are only tools. Oftentimes events have occurred since the last data point (tournament, match or whatever). A player may have been studying hard and has not yet had a chance to demonstrate this improvement. Or they may have been drinking hard and not yet had a chance to demonstrate their new strategy of less is more when it comes to braincells... The swiss system takes this into account and is aware that there has to be a balance between a body of data from the past and new information being generated right now. So for every subsequent round, there is a redivision separating the players into smaller and smaller subgroups based on their performance in the current tournament. Say in the example we are using that in the first round the 1700, 1600, and 1500 players beat their lower rated opponents, but the 1800 lost. The 1800 fell in love with the 1400 and lost to try and get one of those date things he keeps hearing about or the 1400 had quit her job and been practicing for the last month inside an abandoned bomb shelter renamed "Fortress of Scrabbltude", or both. Whatever the reason, these things happen: These for instance and thats why the games are actually played out. So the second round pairings would be 1700 vs 1500 and 1600 vs 1400 for the winners section and 1800 vs 1200 and 1300 vs 1100 in the losers section. In the third round the two players with two wins would play. The four players with one win and one loss would be paired with the top rated against the third and the second versus the fourth. The two players with no wins would play each other. The advantages are clear. The pairings are simple and intuitive enough that they can be done in your head. A person can also look forward each round after the first to playing someone who is having a similar experience to theirs at this particular tournament. This leads to close competitive games which are interesting to both players instead of blowouts which are interesting and/or fun to at most the winning player. End of Math-Like Mega Tangent So instead of "divide group of people with same record in half and have them play each other" scrabble uses a grab bag of methods that vary from site to site and director to director. Here is a typical example: High Level Nonsense Some of the highlights of this ode to obfuscation include "The system is also designed to create the right compromise between absolute perfection, and the need for it to be simple enough to implement manually." It is so simple that it takes 1000 words filled with jargon, two diagrams, and a committee of six people to explain (to other trained tournament directors!). I also especially like this line hidden halfway through: "there may be a last-minute change in its pairing procedure. We will announce any changes as soon as they become official." Basically they reserve the right to change their minds at the last minute and do the whole thing differently should something else strike their fancy. Sigh... So pairings are inscrutable and most directors say something along the lines of "I just put the results into the computer and it tells me what to do" when you ask them who you will be playing or how the scrabble system works. I will beat this rapidly dying horse more next time, but for now let's return to the pigeon hanger/tournament hall where the #$%^ was about to hit the fan (and the top of my head if I was not careful where I sat). The H.A.L. 9000's creepy little cousin S.A.P. 2000 (or Scrabble Arbitrary Pairings that will take 2000 days off your lifespan through stress related ailments and aneurysms) had decided in its infinite wisdom that I should play a big winner instead of a lowly loser like me. At the time, Peggy was definitely better than me, but I was not hopelessly outclassed. So we started to play and fortunately there were no Jekyll and Hyde transformations from my opponent this round. She just played high scoring word after high scoring word. I meanwhile had some strong looking letters, but the bingo (all seven letters used at once to receive a big point bonus) combinations I tried all got challenged off the board. When I got to be several hundred points behind and had taken roughly half as many turns as her I decided it was time to throw in the towel, take a walk and get some fresh non guano scented air. So I said I resign and got up to go. Unfortunately, this was not to be...
"You can't resign."
"I appreciate the encouragement and optimism, but I know when I'm beat. I need to get my head together for the next round."
"No, you don't understand. You are not allowed to resign."
"Right... Are the big bad scrabble police going to come get me?"
"Uh, pretty much. One of the tournament staff is coming over right now."
A "director"(I don't know what to call these people. They settle disputes and can rip dictionaries apart with their minds, umm...lets call them S.A.P 2000 minions since I don't think they are quite human) walks over with a stern expression on their face and I surreally feel like I am being pulled over for speeding after leaving home without my license.
"Is there a problem here?"
"No officer, um scrabble arbiter... guy. I just am getting crushed, so I am going to resign and take a break to get my act together. "
"I am afraid you can't do that."
"Yes, my opponent said that too. What exactly does that mean?"
"Just that. You have to keep playing until the game is over."
"Umm, its over now. I give up. She is infinite points ahead of me and I seem to have lost the ability to spell basic words."
"Its not fair to your opponent to just let them win."
"My...opponent...wants....to....win....That's kinda the whole point."
"She could win by more than she is winning now though."
"Why don't I just let my clock run until she has the score she wants."
"You really don't want to do that. There would be certain consequences..."
"Ok... Can we agree on a number and end this bizarre charade?"
"No, you have to play every turn until the game is over."
"Am I on some kind of scrabble nazi candid camera?"
"No and you need to watch your attitude if you want to keep playing in this tournament."
"But I don't want to keep playing! At least not this round anyways."
"Are you ready to be sensible and start the game again?"
"Sure I'll just pass the rest of the turns and she can score as high as she wants."
"That would be suspicious and unsportsmanlike."
"More suspicious and unsportsmanlike than simply resigning?"
"Exactly."
"Ok, thank you for clearing that up."
S.A.P. 2000 minion leaves...
"I think I have found a solution that will make everyone happy."
"Oh?"
"I'm going to get my last opponent to plug my airways with scrabble tiles until I lose consciousness and wake up in a world without scrabble..."
"Director!!!"
To quote the inventor of the electric guitar necktie: "I feel like everyone around me is taking crazy pills!" Join me next time when I'm accused of cheating for following the rules and I set out on a holy mission to crack the code that is the official scrabble rule book...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Man, there is something truly absurd about that...do the scores actually count towards pairings or results? Otherwise that just doesn't make any sense at all. You should have played the rest of the game spelling only words like it, for, etc, or only played words that are vulgar and/or insulting.

Professor P (Inman) said...

I will explain more next time, but the short answer is they do not count at all towards pairings but they are used kinda like a tiebreaker. If I remember right, I tried to play words that seemed appropriate like ape, nuts and psychokinesis. Maybe I was just thinking a lot about that last one, but you get the idea.