Some "Bysshe" Raises an Excellent Question

In response to my last post where I related my meltdown against Peggy and how I was told I could not resign, a friend asked for some clarification:

ByssheLE 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.

Well, to the best of my knowledge, they do not count towards pairings (phase of the moon and eyecolor do though for the wacky S.A.P. 2000). Scores do come into play for results though. Allow me to explain and/or rant some more... I now know that scrabble tournaments keep track of something called "spread". Like most things with spread in their name, it is full of ^$#*$ and horrible for your long term health. If one player A beats player B 300 to 200, there is a spread of 100 points. If it is the first game of a tournament then Player has started with a cumulative spread of positive 100 and player B has started with a cumulative spread of negative 100. If in the next round player A loses to player C 300 to 350 then their cumulative spread becomes positive 50 (100-50=50). If in this same round, player B wins against player D 200 to 99 then their cumulative spread becomes 1 (-100+101=1). This continues throughout the entire tournament. After all the rounds are over, first place goes to the player with best record in terms of wins and losses. If there is a tie between two or more players because they have the same number of wins and losses cumulative spread is used as the first (and to the best of my knowledge) and only tiebreaker. I understand that something must be used to deal with these situations. Common sense, however, has been left outside looking in like a puppy whimpering in the rain. So you have two competitors in some game/sport that both did well against several others and you are trying to decide which of them is better. In a perfect world how would this be determined? Oh, maybe by having them play each other in whatever skill you are measuring them.... Scrabble tournaments are fortunately run with the belief that most other tournament organizers share (chess, magic, high school football, etc...) that variety is good and you should play a fair amount of different people during the competition. Regardless of how pairings are decided upon it is very often true that players who are tied with the same record have faced each other at least once during the event. If player A and player B finish a tournament tied for first and A beat B when they played two rounds ago, you would think this would be relevant. Head to head competition is, in fact, the first tiebreaker used when two individuals/teams/ robot ninjas or whatever finish with the same record in, oh let's see... There is the NFL, MLB, NBA, WNBA, Soccer in America and abroad, most collegiate sports, chess, magic and i'm pretty sure tiddlywinks. The most notable exception is college football. This is the only major sport I am aware of without a playoff system and where opinion can trump facts and numbers. In other words a team with one or two losses can be a national champion while a team with no losses is arbitrarily decided to be inferior. Even college football uses head to head competition in most of its conferences to determine standings/seedings before teams are selected to scatter across the country to play in different bowls to make money for their schools. I am on the verge of a non scrabble rant here. Let's just say that fans hate the system in college football, it is the exception to the rule and everyone who is not directly making money off the current method wants to make it like every other sport game (except scrabble of course). Deep breaths...

So in a scrabble tournament you can have two players tied for the best record who have played each other during that same tournament, but if one players cumulative spread is one point better than the others then that is the deciding factor for who is "better". Oftentimes, the "winner" is not the one who won when the two people played. I am even aware of one tournament where two players were tied for second, player A had beaten player B twice but still got third because of an eleven point difference in spread. The arguments I have heard to support this bizarre fixation on spread are basically these:

1) It mitigates the amount of luck in the game.
2) It awards consistency.
3) It represents how much more knowledge and/or skill someone had over all their opponents.

Umm, there is luck in just about any game (even chess players have to deal with bad days, illness, etc). You can't "fix" how lucky or unlucky people are. Warning Math Mini Tangent There is an also an implied belief in "gambler's fallacy" here (events in the past have an influence on events in the future even in systems that "reset" such as believing you are "due" to be dealt an ace next time since you have not been dealt one in an hour. The deck is shuffled in between each hand, and does not "care" what happened before. The same is true for a roulette wheel or dice.) Just because a player was "lucky" and drew both blanks in one game does not mean they "should" draw one or zero in the next game. In each game, the number of tiles you draw can increase your chance of drawing a particular one, but what you drew a half hour ago before the bad was refilled and shaken simply has no relevance. Saying that spread matters implies that no one can be "lucky" over the course of several games and that things will even out by the end. They might but they might not. End Math Mini Tangent Spread also does not award consistency. Wins award consistency. The object of the game of scrabble is to score more points than your opponent. If you are consistent, you are able to find a way to achieve that goal on a regular basis. Spread tends to award outliers. If a player has the game of their life and wins by 400 points then this will "make up" for their foibles in several other games. Some players actively hunt for this kind of blowout and I have often heard people looking forward to playing someone who is not just worse than them but susceptible to intimidation and prone to mentally checking out in some form or another. This obsession with spread creates or at least a certain kind of behavior that I find morally repugnant (wow I am really up on my high horse, please forgive me while I gallop a bit farther). There are two sick scenarios that I have seen repeated multiple times. One is the sniffling kid shakedown: a young person, who is perhaps unprepared emotionally for the pressure of a tournament, has a tendency to become despondent when they are losing and since they have been told they have to be a big boy or girl and have to finish the game they will make very poor plays once they are a certain amount behind. This is like smelling blood in the water for some players who will then pile up a huge margin while their young opponent is desperately wishing they could be anywhere else. The other situation is the drifting dearie: an older person who honestly is there to have fun, and is easily intimidated. A good acting performance and a strong personality will keep her or him from challenging ridiculous "words" while fake sympathy and commiseration will keep their mind on grandkids or the good old days. Sigh... These situations tend to happen most often in the lower divisions, but those people paid their money too and in my opinion their games and overall experience count just as much. My overall point here is that "running up the score" and the subsequent spread differential has less to do with word knowledge and more to do with other "abilities". If spread does not matter or only matters if the players did not face each other then the focus is shifted to how people did against others at the top and away from how badly or "efficiently" they abused those at the bottom. A couple quick notes before I close this tangent filled terror of a post: there
is a way to resign and I promise to cover it next time. I am not an innocent paragon and I am aware I have done a little acting in my time. Some of the words I have gotten away with were the result of opponents who had become demoralized for whatever reason. I do maintain that I have tried very hard to be nice to younger players. Lastly, I would like to point out I am not just complaining because of personal results. If anything, the way scrabble decides who is "best" has improved my standings more often than it has hurt it. Next time I promise to focus on the positives for awhile. All is not doom and gloom and despite the considerable issues I have with scrabble tournament logistics, the game and the people who play it have brought me a lot of joy. Hang in there till next time when I will describe my triumphant ascendancy to meritocracy and get back to focusing on the great people I have met instead of whining about the mental institution we sometimes seem trapped inside.