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Drawn Club Matches

Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2015 11:19 am
by Neill Cooper
Having found that the last 4 long play matches in the Briant Poulter (Surrey Schools) League were draws I started to think about how common drawn matches were. In this league, where individual games are not often drawn then for the six board matches the probability of a drawn match is (from Binomial Distribution) is 20/64, or just over 30%. This is reduced if the teams are not of equal strength, or if individual matches end up as draws. In the top division there was only 1 draw in 20 matches, perhaps indicating that the teams were not of equal ability. Drawn matches (and matches of players of similar ability) are more enjoyable and more likely to retain players interest for future fixtures. Obviously not all results reflect the closeness of a match, and vice-versa. We recently won a very close national schools match 6-0.

I continued to peruse the Surrey website and then came across the following amazing league table:

Code: Select all

2014/15	Ellery Williams	P	W	D	L	G	Points
1	Dorking			        3	0	3	0	6	1½
2	Guildford	            3	0	3	0	6	1½
3	South Norwood	        2	0	2	0	4	1

(These were 4 board matches)

Re: Drawn Club Matches

Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2015 11:50 am
by Mike Gunn
My team (Guildford) is playing South Norwood on Thursday and we will (of course) be doing our best to draw the match.

Re: Drawn Club Matches

Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2015 10:28 am
by Kevin Thurlow
"My team (Guildford) is playing South Norwood on Thursday and we will (of course) be doing our best to draw the match."

Instead they lost 4-0, including two defaults...

When I was running the Surrey League, it was common for those two teams to lose the away match to each other 4-0 on default!

The journey between the two clubs was probably the worst in the league then.

Re: Drawn Club Matches

Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2015 6:26 pm
by Mike Gunn
Kevin is right: in a 2 year period I managed to forget completely about one match and then confused the home/ away fixtures (lost match by wrong venue). Things have (mostly) improved by then.