Round-robin vs DE..what's the better test?

[NSXER]

Those who have been around awhile remember the days when tournaments were all 5 point (10 point in the finals) round-robins all the way to the end. To save time direct eliminations were started sometime in the late '80's. Is this really the best test of who's the top fencer at the end of the day?

Why not DE to a round-robin final of 6 or 8 for ten touches.....? In many cases fencers travel thousands of miles only to be eliminated in 3 minutes of fencing time (after 4 or 5 bouts of seeding of course). Tennis at least gives all competitors 2 or 3 sets or more + a possible tie breaker to decide who advances.

5 minutes of fencing (or less) is not enough time to decide winners IMO.....

[eac]

They didn't switch to DEs mainly to save time. They mainly did it to eliminate cheating. In the old system, the whole tournament was a series of pools with 3ish of 6 fencers advancing. You needed 3ish wins to advance. If you already had qualified for the next round, it was an incredibly common practice to throw bouts to your next opponents, on the assumption (sometimes explicit between team captains) that that country would owe you a thrown bout when you needed it. At the international level, at least, this was an incredibly rampant form of cheating, and that's why they switched to DE's: in DE's, if you ever throw a bout, you're out, period. You always have an incentive to win. That's a lot better.

Also, separately, it has been my observation that the current format frequently provides for pretty accurate results. Obviously you can get a tough path and go out earlier than you should, but by and large, on average, it works out well. (And of course, you could get just as much luck in the old system via hard pools, and if god forbid you were from an outsider nation like the US that didn't have bout-throwing deals with everybody, you were HUGELY screwed).

As for your claim that 5 minutes of fencing is not enough to decide winners, I find that completely baseless. I think 5 minutes, particularly in saber, is often a perfectly fine amount of time to decide who's fencing better that day-- to put it another way, if I watched 5 minutes of two people fencing in practice, I could probably tell pretty well who was better.

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!


For starters: RR and DE both have their strengths and weaknesses, so both are the better test. It just matters what you intend to test.

If it is stamina, a 72-person RR format is best.

DE will test other things.

BTW: there are ways to devise formats which punish bout throwing, but still guarantee quite a few bouts to everyone. I have written about that before, do a search if you are interested.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[NSXER]

Originally Posted by eac

As for your claim that 5 minutes of fencing is not enough to decide winners, I find that completely baseless. I think 5 minutes, particularly in saber, is often a perfectly fine amount of time to decide who's fencing better that day-- to put it another way, if I watched 5 minutes of two people fencing in practice, I could probably tell pretty well who was better.

Your analysis is faulted......one 5 minute DE bout vs 5+ bouts in a round robin are totally different tests during a day of competition . Many times the best fencer did not win all of his or her bouts yet still won the tournament in the round robin format.

4 or 5 rounds of 6 + bouts or 30+ bouts in a day is a formidable test of physical and mental strength...how can you compare less than 1/2 the number of matches and then say you know who was truly the better fencer in 5 minutes of fencing...........?

[ysbadadden]

Originally Posted by NSXER

4 or 5 rounds of 6 + bouts or 30+ bouts in a day is a formidable test of physical and mental strength...how can you compare less than 1/2 the number of matches and then say you know who was truly the better fencer in 5 minutes of fencing...........?

DE's are fifteen touches, so the difference in effort isn't as big as you're arguing. There's no unequivocal way of deciding who the best fencer in the event is-- A can beat B who can beat C who can beat A. Personally, I miss the pools system, but as already pointed out, it allowed for, and maybe even encouraged cheating.

[eac]

If you look at lots of results like I do, you notice that 15-touch results (at least when it's not 15-14 or so) have a BIG correlation with who's better. Given two fencers where one is significantly better, the better one will maybe 85-90% of the time win the DE (In sabre, the percentage might be closer to 95 or 98%-- sabre people want to comment?). On the other than, given the same two fencers, the better one will win a 5-touch bout maybe 70% of the time.
Evidence for the latter statistic: Observe any pool you have in any tournament, local, national, international, whatever. Take a given pool. Notice that what people would almost universally consider to be the best fencer in the pool very very frequently loses at least one pool bout, and often two or more. So individual 5-touch bouts are clearly less accurate taken on a bout-by-bout basis than DE's.
The evidence for the former statistic is less forthcoming, but I think many people with a reasonable amount of experience in tournaments would agree that this is the case.
The lots-of-bouts idea, on the other hand, is completely vacuous. Number of bouts is in no way an indication of the level of physical/mental/whatever strain on the winner of the tournament-- there probably aren't even as many touches fenced in a round-robin as in a DE tournament. Take, for instance, a national championships, with a round of pools and then DE's from 128. You have 6 pool bouts, for 30 touches. Then you have 7 DE's, for 105 touches.
In a tournament with 4 rounds of pools, you have 4*6*5 = 120 touches, total, compared to 135 with the DE table.
I'm not saying DE's are necessarily more work, I'm just saying it's comparable. Note that with repechage, that number increases to sometimes 10 DE's for the winner of a table of 128, with repechage from 32 to 8.

In my experience, the people who complain most about DE formats are those who tend to lose in their first DE and complain about not getting to fence more. Personally, I find this a positive aspect of DE's-- the tournament's time (ref time, spectator time, strip time, bout committee time) is not wasted with those in the bottom half of the tournament. They don't want to feel that they suck, so they say "How can they have determined that I suck in only 5 minutes?! The system must be at fault!" Having been in the bottom half of the tournament in oh-so-many tournaments, I know how this feels, but I don't think it means DE's are bad-- it means I sucked at that tournament.

[mrbiggs]

Pure number of touches doesn't matter because the number resets after each bout.

Any given fencer can pretty much beat any given fencer in a pool bout, given a certain amount of luck. This is not nearly the case in a DE.

A pool bout can be won if the other fencer misses 5 times in foil, or even 2 or 3 times in epee. I've won bouts on both of these, several times.

DE bouts can potentially be won on that sort of luck, and I've seen it happen, but it's just much rarer.

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by mrbiggs

Any given fencer can pretty much beat any given fencer in a pool bout, given a certain amount of luck. This is not nearly the case in a DE.

A pool bout can be won if the other fencer misses 5 times in foil, or even 2 or 3 times in epee. I've won bouts on both of these, several times.

DE bouts can potentially be won on that sort of luck, and I've seen it happen, but it's just much rarer.

Case in point:
in one of my first competitions, I was up against a lefty (I am righty) teammate in the ME ind. regional championships. The bout started with me getting a lucky shot. Then we doubled out - 4 times over.

Presto! Bout to Gustafsson


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by eac

The lots-of-bouts idea, on the other hand, is completely vacuous. Number of bouts is in no way an indication of the level of physical/mental/whatever strain on the winner of the tournament-- there probably aren't even as many touches fenced in a round-robin as in a DE tournament. Take, for instance, a national championships, with a round of pools and then DE's from 128. You have 6 pool bouts, for 30 touches. Then you have 7 DE's, for 105 touches.
In a tournament with 4 rounds of pools, you have 4*6*5 = 120 touches, total, compared to 135 with the DE table.
I'm not saying DE's are necessarily more work, I'm just saying it's comparable. Note that with repechage, that number increases to sometimes 10 DE's for the winner of a table of 128, with repechage from 32 to 8.

OTOH, let us consider the format used in the Ljungby fencing marathon, in which I have competed several times.

Competition capped at 72 fencers. 20 (or so) pistes available.
SATURDAY
Stage 1: All fencers put into 12 6-poules. 5 5-point bouts per person.
Stage 2: 100% promoted from stage 1. The better half put into maxipoule A, the worse half put into maxipoule B. Both 36-fencer poules fenced to their entirety. 35 5-point bouts per person.
SUNDAY
Stage 3: 100% promoted from stage 2. Better half of maxipoule A get a bye. The rest fence 15-point bouts, with 2 repechage levels. At most 9 15-point bouts per person. More likely that the winner fencers 6 15-point bouts, though.

Grand total: Winner is likely to fence 40 5-point bouts, and 6 15-point bouts. If you say that a 15-pointer is 3 times as hard as a 5-pointer, it works out to comparable with 58 5-point bouts, or 290 points.

Caveat: On numerous occasions, the 72-man field is not filled, and alterations to the format above are used. One time, there was a flu and only 48 fencers showed up. Then they did away with stage 1, and stage 2 was fenced as a maxipoule of 48. Roughly the same number of bouts per fencer, though.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[tehcow]

The cheating aspect of all-poule competitions is pretty important, especially when back in the day the fencers also doubled as hand judges. My coach was from that era and has told us lots of stories, one involving a final poule he saw at a world championships where there was one guy that everyone else decided to kick out. So they all doctored the judging so he didn't win any of his bouts and threw bouts to each other to end up on equal victories, resulting in a barrage consisting of all the fencers but the poor guy from the unfavoured country. After that, the real final could start.

However, I guess this is mostly irrelevant today with the impartial referee plus the electronic scoring system. But I decided to post this anyway because I thought the story was sort of cool.

[keropie]

Impartial referees might not be quite as common as you assume....

[KD5MDK]

But more common than they used to be.