Friday 17 August 2018

One man wrecking crew

The ACT Interschool events use a restricted swiss system for our qualifying events. Players are grouped by schools (or subsets) and aren't paired against players from the same school/set. Team scores are then based on the top 4 scores from a school (and the next 4 for team 2 etc). The intention of this system is to make events a little more competitive, as in a strict team of 4 system, only board 1 players player other board players etc
On the other hand, a different set of issues arrive, when one school is clearly stronger than the rest. In both Secondary Schools events this year, the top three places were taken by single schools (Canberra Grammar and Lyneham High). It also made the event tough on the other players, as the leading players couldn't take points of each other in a lot of cases, and ended up playing finding opponents on lower scores (which isn't normal in swiss pairings).
The other issue is that we award trophies for perfect score (7 wins from 7 games). In yesterdays event, it was looking as though I might have to hand out 10 such trophies, to players from the same school. Fortunately I was saved by Ricky Luo (Radford) who ended up playing all the top players from Lyneham High. Each round he was paired against someone on a prefect score, and each round he saved me one trophy! By the last round he had taken out 6 Lyneham players and as a result only Yizhen Diao and Manjot Melli ended up on 7/7. Despite his hard work Luo missed out on a perfect score himself, falling just short after a hard fought draw with Safron Archer in round 6.

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