Subjectively, I think that if > 1 person ends up on 100%, there was never any chance of having an outright winner. If several people tie for 1st equal on a score less than 100%, the people in the tie had the opportunity to win outright. To my mind, the latter is better than the former; remembering that the objective of organising any tournament is for it to have a winner, to find out who the best player in the tournament was.Ian Thompson wrote:If accelerated pairings decrease the chances of multiple players tying for first place on a 100% score, doesn't it follow that they increase the chances of multiple players tying for first place on a lower score? Is that an improvement on more than one person scoring 100%? Doesn't it also follow that there are likely to be more players involved in the tie, and that the standard of opposition they've played is likely to vary more than it would with normal pairings? Are either of these desirable?Alex Holowczak wrote:(1) Where the event has more players than the natural limit for a Swiss. A Swiss can handle as many players as you want - this isn't the problem. The problem is having more than one person on 100% at the end.
I think a sponsor's main aim is getting bums on seats seeing what their advertising. What's likely to deliver that aim? In a standard knockout, more people will watch the Final than the Last 64; and I think it would follow in a Swiss that more people will watch Round 9 than Round 1. So I suppose for that reason, you would want the last round to have several people in contention for the prize before Round 9 starts. How they got there is probably not so relevant. I can see that accelerating the pairings works out who the winner is, and takes people out of contention more quickly.Ian Thompson wrote:I would have thought that what a sponsor would want is for the as many players as possible to be in with a realistic chance of winning the tournament for as long as possible. What they wouldn't want is for most of the top players to have played each other several rounds before the end so people would be saying that whichever of them was in the lead at that point was the likely winner of the tournament, unless they slipped up against some lesser player.Alex Holowczak wrote:(4) Another reason for acceleration could be attracting a sponsor. The more 'big' clashes you have then the greater the number of hits on the website and the more attractive the event becomes to a sponsor. I suspect that given the pairings of an Open are only known the night before, you probably would watch the following day whatever the pairings were. I suspect the names of the players in the tournament are a far bigger attraction, rather than who they actually play.
