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How do you guys pair players for the first round. Most tournaments seem to have a random draw first round. Does anyone have a better system? For our local RTT I have debated about asking for lists a week ahead and trying to pair them reasonably to avoid terrible army match-ups. I don't really think I can prevent people from crushing newer players and asking for experience levels seems to vulnerable to abuse.

This idea comes from trolling the local club board. The club has about 10 members that actively participate in tournaments. The top two always seem to place in the top ten regardless of wacky mission rules or a terrible pairing. However, the next three have placed much higher than usual in the last couple of tournaments. When I asked them about how they did so well, it was a unanimous "n00b stomp or jetbike eldar vs foot orks" in the first round that propelled them to a much higher finish. I play against these guys regularly and I know they haven't improved significantly over this time period and they haven't changed armies.

Is this as big a problem as I make it out to be. The obvious solution is to increase the sample size to reduce the effect of any one game, however I can't convince the store owner to kick out the @#$%& magic players for a two day tourney and my 6 game 1000 pt idea got shot down.

End monologue

Questions

1) Is this as big a problem as I make it out to be

2) Does anyone have a simple, fair, uncomplicated system for resolving this, even in part (NOT comp)

3) How do you feel about the TO picking pairing for the first round by simply comparing army lists in a vacuum. Fair/not fair, worthwhile, close to accurate

Thanks
Razor

1) No

2) See 3

3) is basically comp-as-pairing. As long as you're transparent about the way you're evaluating lists, I like comp-as-pairing. Link in sig, scroll down a touch IIRC.

razorlead wrote:
Questions

1) Is this as big a problem as I make it out to be?

No it isn't. It is just luck of the draw. If you get a good match-up or stomp a newbie in the first round, that means that your next 2 opponents are going to be hard as nails. It is good to not do too well in the first round so you can duck the hardest armies in round 2.

2) Does anyone have a simple, fair, uncomplicated system for resolving this, even in part (NOT comp)

Nope

3) How do you feel about the TO picking pairing for the first round by simply comparing army lists in a vacuum. Fair/not fair, worthwhile, close to accurate

Thanks
Razor

Not a good idea if you are the TO because there are going to be a lot of people POed because of their pairing.



Lately some of the larger tournaments where you have to submit your army list ahead of time have gone to comp for the first few rounds, and then battle points afterwords for pairings.

For most RTTs and other tournaments the pairings are done randomly. Most of the time though event organizers will not pair 2 friends or club mates together in the first round, because you play each other all of the time, and you go to tournaments to play new people, not the person you just were in the car with for a couple hours.

It is just luck of the draw. In fact. a few tournaments I have gone to have you pick your opponent out of a hat.

I generally run mine by random pairing, but try to prevent club members from playing against each otehr in the first rond. After that tho, all bets are off.

I do random pairing in the first round, with two caveats.

1.) If people have traveled in from out of town, I don't pair them up against people they traveled with.

2.) Before I do the random pairings, I'll see if anyone wants to play each other in particular as a kind of challenge system. Must be mutual agreement.

Random pairing is almost always the best way to assign first games. This takes out the subjectivity and removes arguments that the TO might have been biased in their pairings.

However, with the current RTT structure of playing three games only, regardless of number of players, you'll never really have a "best overall." You really only have a "best player against the limited sample size that they had to play."

I've been toying with running one,

Basically

first round is random - people that travel together from out of town dont play each other

The way they did it at the Canadian conflicts was the order you registered that day as. So if you go with your buddies you'll probably play them first round, which guarantees you top scores and a sportsmanship vote.

Ravenous D wrote:The way they did it at the Canadian conflicts was the order you registered that day as. So if you go with your buddies you'll probably play them first round, which guarantees you top scores and a sportsmanship vote.

Not if they did it the way we showed them when I did the registration at a Toronto GT way back when. I used to do the registration at a lot of the US GTs, and we came up with an easy system. First 10 registered get assigned to tables 1-10, next 10 are their opponents. Then assign tables 11-20 to the next 10 players and then their opponents. Pretty much takes care of groups travelling together playing each other (unless it's a really large group) and when the occasional mix-up happened, we were always willing to adjust, at least for the first round.

Trying to avoid a newb stomp is bad for a TO. This basically gives someone a bonus (The newb) or a penalty (The experienced person) that is completley unearned.

The point of a tournament is to have people win via thier own skill. Trying to manipulate pairings to take skill out of the equation reaks of trying to manipulate the winner based on favoritism.

No it isn't. It is just luck of the draw. If you get a good match-up or stomp a newbie in the first round, that means that your next 2 opponents are going to be hard as nails. It is good to not do too well in the first round so you can duck the hardest armies in round

this has actually been a bi tof a problem people not playing there best to pair down to weaker armies so they can get better scores in round 2. so we recently went to round 1 random pairing 2 random pairing 3 power pairing

I can say from experience, first round pairings don't make the tournament. I've both gotten hammered and still placed above the guy who hammered me and been on the reverse side of things. These were all battle points only scores as we don't use soft scores in the tournaments around here.

I like the pair at random, and even if you get paired with a buddy, best to go ahead and get it out of the way so you don't play them for placement later on (you do need to share that car ride back and it can be some bad mojo...been there, done that, designed the t-shirt)