departed players

[meremortals]

In a contest of this size I suppose it is inevitable that some folks that get off to a bad start or fall too far behind will pack it in. I notice we have a couple already. This kind of skews the results especially the tiebreaker. Player A may have had a match against one of these players while they were active, Player B a match after they were gone.

I propose in future competitions that if a player does not submit an entry, his opponent plays against an average of the totals of all players that did. It's not perfect but at least is better than the current. I played against one of these folks last week scoring 39 points picking up the win and +39 on the tiebreaker. Other players in my division did not have this luxury while the departed player was active.

Food for thought.

[teddy sherr]

Yes I know this is a possibility as i run this contest in the Minnesota Downs residency and we had that problem and after i was sick and away for 2 months last summer we paired out the non players and removed those stats.

I cannot change the rules for this years competition as it has already started and really only 3 or 4 players have not sent in entries and 1 of them is resting all his horses and should be back soon as his horses all got out of their training sequences.

One of my ideas was to create a pool from 4 stables of mine and tomake that the common entry and teams will have to play that team whenever a non entry comes in for their score. The team that does not enter would automatically receive a loss and negative =/- points. The problem is what happens as is the case with one player this week who is away on holiday's on a cruise and is not entering any horses this week.

I guess no matter how much you want to make a contest perfect you really never can.

When this contest ends at the end of this year I will ask players for feedback if they think any rule changes are required for the 2008 version of the contest.


THEO

[meremortals]

Your generic entry idea may not work as well. You could have a banner week and beat everyone up against the dummy entry. An average of all entrys would work better.

Thanks for a great contest. This is a lot of fun. I look forward to it every week.

[scoot]

I think the generic entry idea is actually a good idea IF the team who did enter receives the win even if the generic entry beats them.

Then they receive an automatic +0 so as not to gain anything on the tie-breaker (or some other generic number) so the only point in playing the generic entry is to ensure that if a team has a bad week it doesn't still get a good + score to their tie-breaker.

Might need some thought though and definitely no point putting it in this year as it would change the rules completely.

scoot