Team Scored Round Robin

Many TT clubs run a weekly, drop-in, rating-level-segregated, round-robin format, club tournament.
Team scoring can easily be added to rating-based round robin tournaments, which solves the problems and delivers the benefits of team play.

Most people love to play on a team.

• You play for each other.
• ... help each other.
• ... feel proud of each other.
• Teams are a great idea!

But team play arrangements can be inconvenient and unbalanced:

• A missing player breaks up the play sequence.
• Drop-in players are excluded.
• Team members don't get to play with each other.
• Outcomes are too predictable, so team balance becomes a huge problem.
  • Ratings are such a strong predictor of outcomes that when players are 100 points apart in rating, upsets are only about 1 in 8 (~12%).
  • Even with near-perfect balance among teams, most pair-wise matches, and therefore the team results, are known in advance:
  • Boring!

Many TT clubs run a weekly, drop-in, segregated-levels, round-robin format, club tournament.
Change nothing. Simply add Team Scoring.

To get a Team Score, simply add up the rating changes of all the players on the team.

Here is a team score generator which you can use.

Why does it work?

• A team with members that won is a team that improved their ratings that day, and they deserve to win!
• And a team with members whose ratings fell will lose. That's justice.
• Now you can root for each other: when you win, they win, and when they win, you win!
• Help each other out, be interested in each other's skills, play for something bigger than yourself.
• Everyone will improve, and some team will win! (A trophy?!)

Why it doesn't stink:

• No change to the round-robin organization.
• No problem if drop-in players show up; they can play in the round robin and simply don't get counted in any team's results.
• No problem if a team member is missing. Their rating change is zero, so it neither hurts nor helps their team. You can't win by not being there, but you won't lose either.
• No balance problems:
  • Players still play within their level on a round-robin table.
  • Team members can even play each other; rating changes cancel.
  • Results are much harder to predict.

Why it's Grrrreat!:

• All teams are automatically balanced. Everyone is equal in this system. Anyone, expert or beginner, can improve or deteriorate.
• Teammates win by helping each other get better.
• Good players will talk to new players much more, and take an interest in them and their skills, instead of just talking to similar-level players on their same table.
• Teams can win by helping each other to improve, especially rapidly-improving beginners. Promising new recruits are the biggest potential asset to a team, if you can get them to join, play a lot, and improve.
• Parents can even be on the same team as their kids -- and kids will probably contribute more to the team's success! Perfect!
• The size of an upset is automatically incorporated into the scoring. An upset between players 200 points apart is a huge event, and should count more than an upset between players 10 points apart. Ratings take care of that.

This should be very easy, if you are already generating ratings to run your tournaments.

• Make a list of teams and their members. Here is an example of the team file format.
• Send me your list, and I'll add it to my web server; I'll even help you format it if you want.
• Generate a table of scores similar to this one for each tournament.
• Submit it to the Team Score program here, and save/print the output to show everyone.

• Schedule: a season of 10 weeks.
• Cost:
  • $40 for members, $60 for non-members, which includes gym fee.
  • This is the normal gym fee plus ?$10? per player.
  • Paid in advance for easy bookkeeping and to motivate regular attendance!
• Team selection:
  • pick your own teams of up to 5 players each;
  • any unassigned players will be assigned so as to maximize skill variation within teams.
• Format: weekly round-robin drop-in tournament.
  • Non-team-members can also play, paying the regular gym fee.
  • Cumulative rating changes is the team score for the tournament.
  • Players actually present are sorted by rating and put into groups.
  • A player who won a group the last week will be moved up a group.
  • A player who lost a group the last week will be moved down a group.
  • Play matches round-robin, all possible pairs, within each group.
  • Match is 3 out of 5 games to 11 points.
  • If time is tight, do 2 out of 3 games to 11 points.
  • Record and enter your results.
  • Organizer will:
    • calculate rating changes for each player and each match.
    • sum up rating changes for team's members, that's the team score.
  • Team scores for the week and season are posted the next week
• Ratings: Initial player ratings will be the organizer's best guess, incorporating USATT and/or other available ratings. Initial rating guesses will be made on the high side if the data doesn't justify precision. A meaningfully stable current rating should be possible by using the last 10 or so matches with league participants (e.g., 2 or 3 round-robin days, possibly at other clubs).
• Awards: at the end of the season.

 

Comments?  Please contact Tom Veatch at tv@sprex.com or 1-206-367-7741.

Modified: November 6, 2002. 
Reformatted January 23, 2004.