I wonder how people would feel about the current system if Ilya would lose the final against Jan Simara. He would then still be placed firmly ahead of him in the main tournament, but be 2nd place in the championship.

Another potential paradox which doesn't matter this time is that a player might have a chance to win the open tournament, but loses this chance by playing the integrated k.o. tournament for the championship.

I expect at that point the knockout event would be eliminated. My understanding is that the knockout was created because Europeans weren't capable of winning the EGC championship outright against the visiting (recently Korean) competition. If European playing strength reaches the level where they can actually compete then the knockout is no longer needed.

I don't see why it would be a problem. You may go into the knock-out as the underdog, but if you win, surely everyone is going to recognise your achievement. You're no longer in a McMahon, so why would anyone point backwards to the McMahon score?

The knock-out is a reasonable way to satisfy the EGF's constitution.

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North Lecale

You should really do a better job of publicizing that information (http://www.egc2012.eu/congress/main-tou ... nt-round-9).

In general, in a tournament, you mark off a section of time in which players compete, and strive to make it so that the player who performs the best wins. If Simara manages to beat Ilja tomorrow, that expectation will be badly violated. Ilja will have faced much stronger competition, while winning more games against them, and even beating Simara once in the process. Yet Simara will be the champion, since this last game is weighted more heavily than the others. It will become obviously implausible to claim that this tournament selects the best performing European player.

(I feel like I should go ahead and note that I dislike this tournament format on ideological grounds. So you may think I am biased).

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Occupy Babel!

if i am correct, the reason was that EGC tournament attempts both to let Korean and other visitors to play against best Europeans and choose the European Champion.

the earlier system was: all play MacMahon together, the first player is the winner of Open, the first European is the European Champion
drawbacks: often there are n super-strong Asians who beat every European if they play against him. then if one European was paired against k of them, he has better chances to win the Championship than someone paired against k+1 Asians. this element was mostly random and widely considered unfair

the current system has its own drawbacks, as was already pointed out.


as it is now, the first 7 rounds of MM serves as qualification for Europeans to enter the 'real' tournament - 8 players knock-out. i personally also slightly dislike knock-outs (even worse if the strongest participant get eliminated by an upset in an early round, as could happen in Shikshin-Surma game). still it is apparently the most popular format in most sports. plus it avoids the alchemy of others' games influencing your result

as an interesting and little known format, i came across the floating multiple elimination, which is used in Arimaa championships. it resembles a swiss system, only if you accumulate a certain number of loses (3, for example), you drop out of the competition. this continues until only one player remains.
advantages: fair, clear, stronger players get more games (to better decide between them), top places are not decided before the end
disadvatanges: takes more time than a simple knock-out, as much as round-robin (or possibly more). this probably disqualifies it as a suitable European Championship format

to refresh the constructive discussion, what were other proposals for the EGC format before the current one got adopted?

PS: to be fair, i am biased towards the current format due to my fellow countryman being in the finals and having a shot at being the champion

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Spilling gasoline feels good.

I might be wrong, but probably not.

It's not my job to publicise for the EGF. You can make the argument that if Jan wins, he didn't deserve to, but I really don't think anyone will buy that. Take the football world cup - ever see anyone make that argument there? People will just congratulate him.

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North Lecale

The old supergroup system was flawed. Everyone was aware of that. When a Korean player wasn't able to start in the supergroup, and finished in second, when he won the most games - and won against the champion, people started saying so. It wasn't fair on the European players, it wasn't fair on the non-European players, and so it got changed.

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North Lecale

Well, both Ilya and Artem were ahead of the (few) Korean competitors present in Tampere 2010, i.e. this already happened before the current system was introduced. Obviously the old system had many flaws, but that Europeans can't compete against strong visitors was at no point true.

If EGF is concerned about European competitiveness it should help Artem get a visum.

To clarify: If Jan wins, I will just congratulate him as well.

It happened, Jan Simara won.

Congrats to Jan!

Repetition of this myth does not make it true. The KO was introduced for different reasons discussed earlier.



That the European Open Championship is not won by Europeans each year or that Europeans do not totally crush non-Europeans does not mean that European playing strength would be below non-European EGC participants' playing strength. See earlier years for evidence.

"best performing" depends on definition.

1) "winning the KO"

2) "highest place in the EOC table"

3) "highest average rating since just after the previous EGC until the end of the current EGC"

4) "best performance according to some yet unspecified criteria other than rating since just after the previous EGC until the end of the current EGC"

In particular, it is plausible under (1) but implausible under (2).

Discussion started much earlier.

1. The European Champion has been the open champion twice in the past ten years. Of course we also have ratings that demonstrate that the Asian visitors have performed above the level of any but the best Europeans.

I have kindly edited your comments to make it clearer that they don't make sense.

The question is whether, given some independent criteria of what constitutes best performance, argue that the tournament can deliver the right verdict.

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Occupy Babel!

My comments make sense, although maybe not the sense you have been expecting in them. My comments are not meant to say that each option would be a (or: an equally) good choice for "best performance" but to exhibit the need for your conclusion: that some independent, preliminary, a piori considerations are useful before one can then assess "best performance" under a (or: the given) tournament system.

Logically speaking, I have not demonstrated that. But that is only relevant if either a) our goal is to rigorously prove the facts about the tournament, b) you're seriously claiming that the current tournament might be a good way to assess relative performance. Are you?

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Occupy Babel!

I maintain that, after the seeding to the KO, the KO (except for the losers' games) is a good (but not the best; pretty much the best possible for a 3 games in 3 days system) system for determining the European Champion.

The seeding to the KO is a good compromise and - given the schedule and other requirements - about as good as it can be. (Minor improvements would be possible.)

The coexistence of EC and EOC is a compromise - good in some respects, less good in others.

If that's your criteria for the tournament, that's what you set. I know of very few tournaments that are based on performance rather than results within a set of constraints (for example, in Chess, where "effective performance" is frequently calculated, it's never more important than academically interesting). In a knockout, he who doesn't lose, wins. Over the course of the knockout, Jan Simara never lost an overall match, therefore performed the best in the section of the tournament that decided on the winner.

I don't see the paradox. Most group + knockout tournaments have a "play well enough to reach the knockout" phase and a "don't lose any more" phase, they don't reward the team or individual who netted the most points / goals, conceded the least etc over the course of the tournament, as that's not the purpose of the format.

The whole point of a knockout format is that the winner is the champion, therefore whoever wins the final is the champion. No one ever makes a serious claim that the champion of sport is the best player in the field at that given time, whether it's chess, go, football or anything else. If you want "best player", you probably have to refer to ratings tables. The champion is just that, no more, no less.

Topazg, you are importing too much baggage into the notion of performance. One notion of performance is effective performance incorporating other ratings. One other, simpler, notion of best performance is "most wins". An ordinary knockout or Swiss both use this metric (except for bands and tiebreaks and all that in a Swiss--knockout is cleaner but has other costs).

It's worth noting that in a properly seeded knockout, you have an expectation that the best player in terms of effective performance will be the best player in terms of the official criterion for the winner. This can fail, of course, if there are enough upsets that are properly distributed, but the hurdle that the winner has no losses and all other players have losses is substantial.

On the plus side, a knockout is simple to understand, and you do not have to worry about artifacts introduced by initial ratings that would appear if you tried to measure effective performance directly.

A tournament happens at a designated time. Unlike ratings, it is not designed to answer the question "who is the best player" but "which player did the best in this week's competition." On that criterion, I think the European system works poorly.

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Occupy Babel!

Aren't we both? Simara performed the best in the knockout, and therefore deserves to win as that was the part of the tournament that determined the champion? Performance in previous stages is therefore irrelevant with regards to assigning the champion, no?



Are you sure? It strikes me that it the European Championship tournament is designed to answer the question "who, out of those that qualified for the knockout stage, performed the best from that point onwards" - on that criterion, I think it does rather well

FWIW, I actually disliked the format from the very first moment it was suggested. All the kerfuffle and issues with foreigners taking part in the EGC and so on I never really understood. As far as I'm concerned, the European Champion can be the highest scoring person in the EGC that is eligible for the title. Sure, who the top players get drawn against can affect it if the top 3 players in the open are all foreign, but I consider that a smaller negative than a knockout format, which to me only has the benefit of being generally quicker and clear.

I would still say that the format is not particularly well thought through, and previously the format seemed a better reflection of the performance overall throughout the week if that's what the organisers were wishing to reward, but with the current format the way it is, the actual result seems inherently fair to me.

You can always specify some sufficiently gerrymandered achievement that a tournament is designed to recognize, and by that criterion, the tournament will always be a pretty good design. My point of view is that there are some general constraints on how a tournament should select a winner, and there's room for debate among those, but that this tournament doesn't do an especially good job of meeting them.

You look at the event, and it looks like a nine round McMahon tournament is its centerpiece. They're playing for nine days with some breaks in between.

Fun test: go to the webpage, look under congress > main tournaments, and try to find some indication that the European knockout even exists. You'll find a big fat table for a McMahon tournament at (http://www.egc2012.eu/congress/main-tournaments/open-european-championship/results-main-tournament-round-9). This seems to have been very dumb of me.

Anyway, the tournament had the rules that it had, Simara is the winner, but I think there's tons of room to criticize those rules.

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Occupy Babel!