[lamford]

Fluffy, on 2012-August-06, 01:47, said:

Today Spain and Brazil play for the second place in their groups in Basket Olympiads.

Whoever wins gets to play earlier against USA. So both want to lose. What will happen?

That is easy. It is the identical game, except all attempts at baskets are at one's own end. And I cannot find anything in the "rules" preventing that.

[Cyberyeti]

lamford, on 2012-August-06, 02:13, said:

That is easy. It is the identical game, except all attempts at baskets are at one's own end. And I cannot find anything in the "rules" preventing that.

Reminds me of a story I heard about a minor American football tournament where ties were split on points difference, and with the last play of the game team A were 2 points up needing to win by 3 and out of field goal range. So they head off for their own end zone, aiming to concede a 2 point safety, win the toss to get the ball (or team B will do the same concede a safety routine) and win in overtime with a 6 point touchdown or 3 point field goal.

Team B were zoned in on what was happening and desperately tried to tackle team A before they reached their own endzone. They failed, team A conceded the safety, got the ball and duly won by enough.

Bad conditions of contest can lead to unintended consequences.

Some leagues tie split on head to head record rather than goal/points difference, the reason for doing this became clear when the two leaders in a football league came to the last match separated by a goal or two's difference, and were playing teams for whom the last match meant nothing. As the double figure goal tally each of the leading teams racked up before half time was steadily increasing ...

[bluejak]

barmar, on 2012-August-05, 19:25, said:

My point about how difficult it is to codify requirements like this also brings to mind Law 74. Think of all the times someone in this forum has suggested that this or that action be considered a 74A2 violation ("remark or action that might cause annoyance or embarrassment to another player or might interfere with the enjoyment of the game"); it's so vague that you can use it almost any time you want to rule that someone is behaving badly.

Perhaps that is a good thing. Too many people want to codify too many situations, which just leads to complications, and there always seem to be more situations. General rules can be judged by the officials and thus cover far more situations.

Cyberyeti, on 2012-August-06, 03:04, said:

Reminds me of a story I heard about a minor American football tournament where ties were split on points difference, and with the last play of the game team A were 2 points up needing to win by 3 and out of field goal range. So they head off for their own end zone, aiming to concede a 2 point safety, win the toss to get the ball (or team B will do the same concede a safety routine) and win in overtime with a 6 point touchdown or 3 point field goal.

Team B were zoned in on what was happening and desperately tried to tackle team A before they reached their own endzone. They failed, team A conceded the safety, got the ball and duly won by enough.

Bad conditions of contest can lead to unintended consequences.

Again, I wonder at the presumption that these are bad CoCs. So, there was an interesting situation. It is hardly the end of the world.

[barmar]

bluejak, on 2012-August-06, 11:59, said:

Again, I wonder at the presumption that these are bad CoCs. So, there was an interesting situation. It is hardly the end of the world.

Not the end of the world, but if you're in the televised sports business, teams deliberately playing poorly are bad for business.

People tune into bridge vugraphs and televised sports to watch players excelling at the game, or at least putting on a good show. Dumping degrades the experience.

[bluejak]

barmar, on 2012-August-06, 21:30, said:

Not the end of the world, but if you're in the televised sports business, teams deliberately playing poorly are bad for business.

People tune into bridge vugraphs and televised sports to watch players excelling at the game, or at least putting on a good show. Dumping degrades the experience.

Dumping is rare and I am not sure it degrades the experience. It is like watching a pair on vu-graph playing a HUM system. Very rare, and an interesting change.

Sure, I think people would get bored of seeing dumping often, but I believe that would not occur.

Are you sure people watch sports to see people excel? I think some people watch motor racing [for example] for the spectacular crashes.

[blackshoe]

bluejak, on 2012-August-07, 07:38, said:

Are you sure people watch sports to see people excel? I think some people watch motor racing [for example] for the spectacular crashes.

Bread and circuses.

[barmar]

There certainly are some sports that are high on the "bread and circuses" scale -- motor racing and hockey come to mind. But I was thinking more of things like the Olympics -- people watch them because of national pride and to see the cream of the crop performing at their best. While dumping may not be frequent in general, 4 teams did it in the Olympic badminton tournament.

But as I suggested, trying to solve this with detailed regulations can result in a cure that's worse than the disease. Vague references to sportsmanship in the CoC should be sufficient, allowing judges to make intuitive "I know it when I see it" rulings in the rare cases when it occurs. Jeff Rubin's dream of CoC that prevent dumping is just that, a dream.

[Cyberyeti]

barmar, on 2012-August-07, 08:21, said:

There certainly are some sports that are high on the "bread and circuses" scale -- motor racing and hockey come to mind. But I was thinking more of things like the Olympics -- people watch them because of national pride and to see the cream of the crop performing at their best. While dumping may not be frequent in general, 4 teams did it in the Olympic badminton tournament.

Add another case, an Algerian runner Makhloufi qualified for the 1500m final. He wanted to be scratched from the 800m heats, but his federation forgot to do it. He was told that if he failed to show for the 800m heat he would be scratched from the 1500m final. So he turned up at the heat, ran about 1/4 of it and pulled out. The authorities threw him out of the 1500m final for essentially not trying.

I believe he's been reinstated after a medical examination. Guessing a bit as I haven't found a clear report of why, I suspect he's carrying a twinge that he didn't want to aggravate.

Edit - he didn't look injured as he sprinted away and won the 1500m gold.

Some people do attend hockey on the basis of "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out", but if your one night at the olympics was to see the badminton, I would understand why you felt cheated.

[campboy]

bluejak, on 2012-August-07, 07:38, said:

Dumping is rare and I am not sure it degrades the experience. It is like watching a pair on vu-graph playing a HUM system. Very rare, and an interesting change.

Sure, I think people would get bored of seeing dumping often, but I believe that would not occur.

Are you sure people watch sports to see people excel? I think some people watch motor racing [for example] for the spectacular crashes.

A situation where both sides want to dump might be interesting, depending on the sport, but often it will not. Perhaps more of an issue is that it certainly will not be interesting if only one side wants to dump, which is probably at least as common a situation.

[gnasher]

barmar, on 2012-August-07, 08:21, said:

But as I suggested, trying to solve this with detailed regulations can result in a cure that's worse than the disease. Vague references to sportsmanship in the CoC should be sufficient, allowing judges to make intuitive "I know it when I see it" rulings in the rare cases when it occurs.

That's a horrible situation to put the players in, because:
- They don't know what standard they'll be judged by.
- Someone who happens to be having an off-day risks getting the team disqualified.
- It forces players to wear themselves out on an unimportant match. Or if they ease off a bit but misjudge what is acceptable, they get disqualified.
- It creates another situation where clever dishonest players can gain over honest players. Some such situations are unavoidable, but the rules should aim to minimise such situations.
- It creates a situation where the officials have to judge a player's motives rather than his actions. Again, this is best avoided where possible.

But in any case, that's not the only solution. It's very easy to write a short regulation that deals with the problem without any ambiguity.

Quote

Jeff Rubin's dream of CoC that prevent dumping is just that, a dream.

I think Rubens would be happy with CoC that (1) aim to minimise the likelihood that a contestant has reason to dump, and (2) if such a situation does arise, allow them to do it. And so would I.

[barmar]

gnasher, on 2012-August-07, 13:23, said:

That's a horrible situation to put the players in, because:
- They don't know what standard they'll be judged by.

As I mentioned earlier, I think most people have similar intuition about this, and that's the standard.

Quote

- Someone who happens to be having an off-day risks getting the team disqualified.

I think most people, and certainly professional officials, should be able to tell the difference between not trying and not succeeding.

Quote

- It forces players to wear themselves out on an unimportant match. Or if they ease off a bit but misjudge what is acceptable, they get disqualified.

We're talking about extreme actions, just just "easing off a bit".

Quote

- It creates another situation where clever dishonest players can gain over honest players. Some such situations are unavoidable, but the rules should aim to minimise such situations.
- It creates a situation where the officials have to judge a player's motives rather than his actions. Again, this is best avoided where possible.

Yes, where possible. I'm just not so sure it's that easy to do without unintended consequences. If you make objective rules, players will find loopholes, and we won't be able to use subjective judgement to punish them. By making the rules subjective to begin with, you allow for judgement.

Quote

But in any case, that's not the only solution. It's very easy to write a short regulation that deals with the problem without any ambiguity.

If it's so easy, why hasn't it been done?

[Vampyr]

barmar, on 2012-August-07, 08:21, said:

Jeff Rubin's dream of CoC that prevent dumping is just that, a dream.

Assuming you are referring to Jeff Rubens (I am not aware of Jeff Rubin's opinion on the matter), I don't think is has to be just a dream -- a great deal of improvement in CoC can be done if situations such as that in the badminton are anticipated.

Round robins are a particularly difficult case, but one possibility is to make advancement onto the knockout table random. This removes transparency from the process though, so it is probably unacceptable. Maybe insurmountable problems will exist any time there is a group from which more than one team goes through; so another possibility is smaller groups guaranteeing only one place in the next stage, with second-place finishers obliged to play off to get in. One problem with this is time and fatigue constraints.

So you have one big knockout, with the top seeds getting byes. Is badminton played enough at an international level so that seeds for teams and individual players can be deterimined with any accuracy? How about new pairings in the doubles? What about playing round robins with the matches split into halves, to make the qualifiers more difficult to predict? What about some kind of double elimination or repechage where a loss in the round-robin stage carries over through the whole event?

And perhaps matches where both teams have already qualified can only ever be meaningless at best.

These suggestions all have their problems, but they are off the top of my head and I am no expert. I do feel that when considered by someone with expertise and experience, improvements (not solutions, mind you) can be found.

[Vampyr]

gnasher, on 2012-August-07, 13:23, said:

I think Rubens would be happy with CoC that (1) aim to minimise the likelihood that a contestant has reason to dump, and (2) if such a situation does arise, allow them to do it. And so would I.

Sure, and so would a lot of us. But (2) does an enormous disservice to the spectators, and for people who had to enter a lottery for the right to pay £100-1000 pounds apiece for tickets, this is not a trivial matter. And the sport itself may well rely on ticket sales and the corporate advertising/sponsorship that accompanies it, for their funding.

[Vampyr]

Another idea for round robins -- a system of "Swiss points" that determines who gets first (second, third etc) choice of their opponent in the next round.

[campboy]

If we're worried about spectators, how about simply having a rule that the teams can agree beforehand to swap results at the end of the match?

[gnasher]

barmar, on 2012-August-08, 08:46, said:

If it's so easy, why hasn't it been done?

It has:

EBU regulations said:

In England it is not, of itself, improper to attempt to influence the results of an event, or part of an event, so as to try to increase one's own overall success in the event. If a Tournament Organiser wishes to prevent such tactics then the competition should be designed accordingly.

[barmar]

gnasher, on 2012-August-08, 12:13, said:

It has:

Has it? That quote says that a TO should do so if they want to avoid such tactics. Do they provide any advice on how?

[gnasher]

barmar, on 2012-August-08, 15:08, said:

Has it? That quote says that a TO should do so if they want to avoid such tactics. Do they provide any advice on how?

I was offering, as promised, a very short regulation that deals with the problem of dumping without any ambiguity. In fact, it can be reduced to nine words: "You may dump if it is to your advantage."
Short? Yes.
Deals with the problem? Yes.
Unambiguous? Yes.

[barmar]

That doesn't deal with the problem, it avoids it by saying that it's not really a problem. It seems like they've thrown up their hands and said "Since we can't prevent it, we'll allow it." I don't know if that's really the case -- maybe they really think dumping is OK. But it seems like a cop-out.

So, assuming you DO want to prohibit dumping, as is more common, how do you go about that in a simple, unambiguous way?

[gnasher]

barmar, on 2012-August-08, 17:03, said:

That doesn't deal with the problem, it avoids it by saying that it's not really a problem. It seems like they've thrown up their hands and said "Since we can't prevent it, we'll allow it." I don't know if that's really the case -- maybe they really think dumping is OK. But it seems like a cop-out.

No, they've said that playing to win is OK. I'm surprised that you think there's anything wrong with that, and I think it's quite unfair to suggest that the people who made this decision were being weak or lazy.

The cop-out, in my view, is from people who say "We're too stupid to avoid creating these situations, so we'll let them happen and then just transfer the problem to the players."

Quote

So, assuming you DO want to prohibit dumping, as is more common, how do you go about that in a simple, unambiguous way?

I don't want to prohibit dumping, because it is ridiculous to organise a competition and then prohibit a contestant from trying to win it. And I'm not going to try to think like someone who does want to do this.

This post has been edited by gnasher: 2012-August-08, 17:22