2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by jonpin »

The short answer is that the teams were seeded 1-96 based on performance through the year (with corrections for rosters), placed in 8 bands of 12, snaked into groups, and in some cases moved horizontally to avoid things like having two teams from one school or several teams from one region in the same group.
If the snake was done perfectly, you would actually expect exactly what John of Barrington suggests, which is that one group would contain one of the best Tier II teams, one of the lowest Tier II teams, and one of the best Tier III teams; that would produce 3 teams in the top 24+a few, and the 4th and 5th place teams being near equal in strength.

For the rebracketing, the procedure was almost identical to that used last year, with the exceptions of me fixing the typo that caused a team to not show up in any group last year and adding a clause about separating same-school teams in lower tiers.

A combined stats file will be posted within a few days, after I've had a chance to catch up on the grading that has piled up in recent times. In the meantime, continue to send your stat corrections. I will forward them onto Andrew Feist, who has the scoresheets, to verify the data in the case of stat corrections. Please be sure to include your team name and the bracket in question, with the round and opponent if possible, as there are approximately 800 games that were played. My policy is that as long as it is internally consistent, the scoresheet is the objective record on the game, so if your corrections do not agree with the scoresheet, I am unlikely to modify the data. Corrections like name and grade, I obviously can and will make. To date, I have received these corrections:

* Correcting a name from Trirushan to Thirushan, but I do not know which team.
* Washington A is JV-eligible.
* Several corrections from Rockford Auburn B.
* One correction from Early College.
* Two different sets of corrections from Wilmington Charter.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by AKKOLADE »

This year, I seeded the teams. I will make a post about the process and the results in the near future and solicit feedback on how to improve. I spent the better part of three days working on seeding and tried to consider as much as I could.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Hyrdofluoric_Acid »

yes that may be true but that poses inherent issues for example many teams including us studied a lot right before the tournament and changed significantly. If you go based of of Fred Morlan's rankings TJ should have been tier II or III but was in the top 16. the other thing was that after losing 4 games there was nothing we could do. In the first 5 games we had two that ended within a single tossup and after that we won 11 in a row with no hope of either placing higher than 49th or winning the JV trophy. Although I doubt we could have beat Chattahoochee I think we could have beat Dunbar for second and we would likely have had that opportunity if Stevenson's star player had not left. My issue is there that there are 9 teams that placed above us that neither beat us, or had better statistics than us or beat anyone that beat us, the transitive property of beating. In conclusion to me it would seem that there should either a better way to seed the first pools or like more mobility after the first round. Also just in case it sounds like I am the only one with this issue, it is my firm belief that Hinsdale should have placed above carbondale as they have so often throughout the year and that saratoga probably should have been in tier 1. So yeah overall other than the opening pools the format was great, the questions were fantastic, the hotel was nice, and the experience was wonderful and I hope to comeback next year when I won't even have to fly.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by no ice »

If we're going to have a conversation about this, I want to express my agreement with John's point on allowing for some form of greater "mobility" after the preliminary rounds.

The main goal of a national championship is to determine the best team in attendance, and the NSC format does that more thoroughly than the HSNCT format, as the superplayoffs are more forgiving of upsets and require that the eventual victor will have played each of the other top 8 teams. Obviously, seedings cannot be perfect, but they are necessary and are not what I take issue with. I only wish that a team's seeding and subsequent prelim pool assignment would not dictate how it places at the tournament, because an equally important goal of running a good tournament is to ensure that every team is satisfied with the overall product. When a team blunders and loses games against lesser opponents, it should have no one to blame other than itself if it places lower than it had hoped. However, when the structure of the tournament itself is what prevents a team from reaching its potential, a team has the right to feel cheated in some way.

Though I ended up having fun and enjoying the questions and competition, I maintain that the latter categorization applies to my team. It's true that a team that loses twice in its prelim pool has no chance of winning a national championship, but it is kind of difficult not to lose twice when, in two consecutive games, a player on the opposing team puts up an NSC-record-high 8 powers against us. Our initial expectations of placing in the top 8 or 16 teams can be justified by the fact that we had the 8th highest PPB in the field, that we tied for 8th at the HSNCT a week prior, and that this season we have beaten exactly half of the teams that did make the top 8. For a team with such high hopes, being told that we could place no higher than 25th after only seven matches was disappointing, to say the least; that disappointment was further amplified when weaker teams were able to automatically place higher than us purely by merit of an easy prelim pool.

I honestly don't know if there are any preferable alternatives, and it may be that this is not egregious enough to warrant a new or modified tournament format. My favorite part of a card system like HSNCT's is that all teams can easily overcome being seeded too low by winning more games, but the card system has its own fair share of problems (as evidenced by the HSNCT discussion), and it is objectively better to have 15 as opposed to 10 guaranteed matches for all teams. The rigidity that comes with relying so heavily on initial seedings and thus being unable to accommodate for unexpected performances (a team over-/under-achieving) or circumstances (LASA B missing its full team until playoffs, Centennial A missing a main scorer until Sunday, Wilmington Charter missing a main scorer for the entire tournament) is definitely a weakness in its lack of flexibility that locks teams into a certain range of possible placements while barring them from going any higher or lower.

I apologize if I misunderstood some aspects of the NSC tournament format or if this seems like a rant attempting to direct blame for my team's internal frustration over our failure.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by AKKOLADE »

Hyrdofluoric_Acid wrote:yes that may be true but that poses inherent issues for example many teams including us studied a lot right before the tournament and changed significantly. If you go based of of Fred Morlan's rankings TJ should have been tier II or III but was in the top 16. the other thing was that after losing 4 games there was nothing we could do. In the first 5 games we had two that ended within a single tossup and after that we won 11 in a row with no hope of either placing higher than 49th or winning the JV trophy. Although I doubt we could have beat Chattahoochee I think we could have beat Dunbar for second and we would likely have had that opportunity if Stevenson's star player had not left. My issue is there that there are 9 teams that placed above us that neither beat us, or had better statistics than us or beat anyone that beat us, the transitive property of beating. In conclusion to me it would seem that there should either a better way to seed the first pools or like more mobility after the first round. Also just in case it sounds like I am the only one with this issue, it is my firm belief that Hinsdale should have placed above carbondale as they have so often throughout the year and that saratoga probably should have been in tier 1. So yeah overall other than the opening pools the format was great, the questions were fantastic, the hotel was nice, and the experience was wonderful and I hope to comeback next year when I won't even have to fly.
So, this is the tournament format, not seeding. I'm sure a thread about this would be useful too.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Banana Stand »

no ice wrote:Though I ended up having fun and enjoying the questions and competition, I maintain that the latter categorization applies to my team. It's true that a team that loses twice in its prelim pool has no chance of winning a national championship, but it is kind of difficult not to lose twice when, in two consecutive games, a player on the opposing team puts up an NSC-record-high 8 powers against us. Our initial expectations of placing in the top 8 or 16 teams can be justified by the fact that we had the 8th highest PPB in the field, that we tied for 8th at the HSNCT a week prior, and that this season we have beaten exactly half of the teams that did make the top 8. For a team with such high hopes, being told that we could place no higher than 25th after only seven matches was disappointing, to say the least; that disappointment was further amplified when weaker teams were able to automatically place higher than us purely by merit of an easy prelim pool.
I don't think this "problem" could ever be avoided no matter how teams are bracketed or the tournament formatted. Like you said, a team losing twice in prelims just doesn't have a shot at the title, and while placing top-20 or top-10 or whatever pet goal you have for your team feels really good, I don't think a national tournament has to be that precise in its rankings. The best teams will always rise to the top and won't have to worry about how favorable their prelim schedule is because they know that they'll most likely be the best no matter who they're scheduled against. Being a bubble team means your placing will vary a lot more depending on who and how you play on a certain day, and while your team certainly had a shot at placing in the top two brackets, it just didn't work out that way and all you can do is hope to be the best in a lower bracket.

I definitely understand the frustration in feeling cheated out of a placement you feel your team deserves. Going into the 2013 HSNCT, I felt confident and thought that my team definitely could get T-33 at the very least. After the first day, we were 5-5(3 games lost on last tossup, one game with a very fast neg that swung the game 90 points) and relegated to a 98th place finish, even though our PPB was 23rd overall. I didn't think we were the 98th best team in the country, but that wasn't NAQT's fault and there was nothing that could have possibly prevented our placing besides us getting more tossups.

And don't worry about it; this isn't even your last year.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Fado Alexandrino »

Hyrdofluoric_Acid wrote:yes that may be true but that poses inherent issues for example many teams including us studied a lot right before the tournament and changed significantly. If you go based of of Fred Morlan's rankings TJ should have been tier II or III but was in the top 16. the other thing was that after losing 4 games there was nothing we could do. In the first 5 games we had two that ended within a single tossup and after that we won 11 in a row with no hope of either placing higher than 49th or winning the JV trophy. Although I doubt we could have beat Chattahoochee I think we could have beat Dunbar for second and we would likely have had that opportunity if Stevenson's star player had not left. My issue is there that there are 9 teams that placed above us that neither beat us, or had better statistics than us or beat anyone that beat us, the transitive property of beating. In conclusion to me it would seem that there should either a better way to seed the first pools or like more mobility after the first round. Also just in case it sounds like I am the only one with this issue, it is my firm belief that Hinsdale should have placed above carbondale as they have so often throughout the year and that saratoga probably should have been in tier 1. So yeah overall other than the opening pools the format was great, the questions were fantastic, the hotel was nice, and the experience was wonderful and I hope to comeback next year when I won't even have to fly.
TJ won their game against Shanghai and their tiebreaker against Saratoga, so they should be top tier. Saratoga lost their game to Shanghai and their tiebreaker against TJ, so they shouldn't have been tier 1. Whether it's a circle of death in which one or two survive, all three teams are given a second chance to advance. I don't think there's anything unfair with this. Even when seeding is done well (e.g. not 2014 DI ICT), there's no reason a quizbowl tournament's results should exactly match what people expected going in.

There's a thread from a year or two ago about the ICT format which I can't find but basically boils down to the fact that if you're gonna lose two games to teams within your bracket, then you probably don't deserve to win the title. I don't think it's viable with the current length of the tournament and size of the field to let 3 teams through from a bracket in any stage of the tournament. I think 12->3 would be a great way for national tournaments to make their first cut like ACF Nationals was this year, but that's 4 more rounds than the similar sized current 8->2 cut at NSC (and ICT).
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Knickerbocker glory »

Speaking as someone who lost a close game to Shanghai American Puxi (a team that was ranked #154 in HSQB Rank, compared to Saratoga's #19), then lost by 10 points on a tiebreaker to TJ, who I'd earlier beaten 470-250, I think that the PACE format is about as fair as a national championship playoff format can be. Of course, the ideal would be to have a round-robin, but that's totally unfeasible for a 96-team field.

Was I disappointed with not making top bracket? Yes. But I won't blame the format for it. TJ played one hell of a game and beat Saratoga fairly in the tiebreaker, so I feel their advancement was fair.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Andre97 »

It looks like my team was the dark horse going into our group seed. We knew we were under ranked going into PACE. Our lack of opportunities to play, alongside my team being much, much stronger on a non-NAQT distribution, probably put us lower than expected. Looking purely at HSQB rankings, our PPB did put us lower on the ladder. Maybe using another metric might help in the future? Though we play in a much weaker regional field, our powers per 20 tossups was better than what our bonus conversion indicated. Also, may be when ranking teams in the future it would help to check for large discrepancies in NAQT and non-NAQT sets, since my team is actually much better at the latter?
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by AKKOLADE »

The following is an honest question: as someone who lives in Kentucky and has never been further west than Chicago, how would I know that your team:

1) is better on non-NAQT questions (especially when you didn't play a tournament on them)?
2) is stronger than your two recorded performances?
3) your 15PG is actually representative of your strength, considering your admittedly weaker competitors?
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Andre97 »

I'm using these as theoretical suggestions. They can't apply to us, but maybe for other teams with available information, they could be useful. Underseeding hurts all the teams in the same bracket, so I'm just suggesting what I think might help to prevent it in the future. You're right as to that there is no way you could've known we were underseeded.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by AKKOLADE »

In terms of prelim PPG for your bracket, you finished one spot/line above where you were seeded.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Andre97 »

If you're underseeded, you've got a tougher prelim bracket. Though we did end up doing better, if we were seeded appropriately we might or might not have done better.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by AKKOLADE »

Andre97 wrote:If you're underseeded, you've got a tougher prelim bracket. Though we did end up doing better, if we were seeded appropriately we might or might not have done better.
Basically, you're saying that every team should end up in the exact position they were seeded in by the end of the tournament.

The idea that anybody could predict the result of every game of a tournament is insane. Every competition has upsets happen. No metric can "prevent" this.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Sniper, No Sniping! »

I second Jack.

Very few squads coming in have a realistic chance at winning an NSC title. I think every team recognizes that, but they still play the game anyways. I would much rather be "under-ranked" than not "under-ranked" (don't want to say perfectly-ranked, or over-ranked) because then there's a chip on your shoulder. Furthermore, I doubt anyone wants a cake walk nat'l tournament experience. Plus, there's more to play for- there are much better games and consequentially it's more aspiring to play "up" than "down". Unfortunately, it's far easier to gripe "we wuz robbed" than take some positives out of what you consider to be a disappointing performance. With that said, you'll find it far more beneficial to take the latter approach than the former.

My favorite thing about NSC is the seedings only serve as a barrier to a title or high finish if you let them. Those that do seed try the best that they possibly can, and as a result it maximizes the potential for very competitive games. Even with the seeding not being ideal, the teams find their way into their proper final ranking one way or another. Perhaps even better is the fact that no one is entitled to a final ranking despite the projection, and teams do in fact have the potential to finish a few spots higher than expected or even a rung or two lower, e.g. the 49-52 teams at NSC 2014 all had higher PPB's than the teams in the 41-48 spots. The games do the talking. Sometimes it does suck if you lose games you don't think you should have (last year at PACE of our 7-8 record, we lost five games by a combined 80 points), but as always the rankings and your performance culminate in worthwhile games you can only get better from by playing. After all, that justifies the money you spend on the tournament, no?

Fred, I thought the preliminary seeds for this year's tournament was done pretty well. I especially liked the morning group LASA A (Armstrong) was in, unlike all of the other preliminary groups, this pod didn't seem to have a clear-cut number #2 team before the games were played. It seemed like three different schools aside from LASA had a pretty fair shot at breaking the top two of that pod, and it turned out it was four different schools of similar caliber that had a pretty good chance at either forcing a tiebreaker or outright clinching that spot. It also created some really good games in the morning between teams of comparable strength. I liked that.
no ice wrote:I honestly don't know if there are any preferable alternatives, and it may be that this is not egregious enough to warrant a new or modified tournament format. My favorite part of a card system like HSNCT's is that all teams can easily overcome being seeded too low by winning more games, but the card system has its own fair share of problems (as evidenced by the HSNCT discussion), and it is objectively better to have 15 as opposed to 10 guaranteed matches for all teams. The rigidity that comes with relying so heavily on initial seedings and thus being unable to accommodate for unexpected performances (a team over-/under-achieving) or circumstances (LASA B missing its full team until playoffs, Centennial A missing a main scorer until Sunday, Wilmington Charter missing a main scorer for the entire tournament) is definitely a weakness in its lack of flexibility that locks teams into a certain range of possible placements while barring them from going any higher or lower.

I apologize if I misunderstood some aspects of the NSC tournament format or if this seems like a rant attempting to direct blame for my team's internal frustration over our failure.
My counter-argument would be that the HSNCT card system provides no incentive to start out strong. Bloomington 2014: 4-0 start, 1-5 finish. In 2013 we beat Jack's squad @ HSNCT. We too finished 5-5, eight of our ten opponents made the playoffs and the two that didn't also finished 5-5. Evidently, a 5-2 start with wins over two (at the time) top 25 Franking teams was all for naught, as we proceeded to (admittedly) play like crap and skid the rest of the way. Meanwhile, there was a school that started 3-4 and won their last three to make it into the Sunday portion. I was obviously irritated afterwards, but I let it pass and recognized the great games we got the privilege of playing were actually pretty fun. The next year @ HSNCT, I just let go and played like it was it typical Saturday NAQT event, and as expected we did a lot better with much nicer wins. Also, HSNCT most definitely has played ball with similar "circumstances" issues w/ some nationally competitive squads in the past.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Andre97 »

Stefan HSQBRankovich wrote:
Andre97 wrote:If you're underseeded, you've got a tougher prelim bracket. Though we did end up doing better, if we were seeded appropriately we might or might not have done better.
Basically, you're saying that every team should end up in the exact position they were seeded in by the end of the tournament.

The idea that anybody could predict the result of every game of a tournament is insane. Every competition has upsets happen. No metric can "prevent" this.
That's not what I'm saying. I was just defending that being seeded higher would have given a relatively easier pool. I'm not attempting to criticize your methods in seeding teams, as I thought our pool was pretty fair. I was just trying to suggest methods to possibly improve it in the future. Of course upsets happen, and there's little that can be done to circumvent this. Since I'm obviously not experienced with seeding and all, I guess just disregard what I'm saying if its not helpful.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by jonpin »

Sniper, No Sniping! wrote:My favorite thing about NSC is the seedings only serve as a barrier to a title or high finish if you let them. Those that do seed try the best that they possibly can, and as a result it maximizes the potential for very competitive games. Even with the seeding not being ideal, the teams find their way into their proper final ranking one way or another. Perhaps even better is the fact that no one is entitled to a final ranking despite the projection, and teams do in fact have the potential to finish a few spots higher than expected or even a rung or two lower, e.g. the 49-52 teams at NSC 2014 all had higher PPB's than the teams in the 41-48 spots. The games do the talking. Sometimes it does suck if you lose games you don't think you should have (last year at PACE of our 7-8 record, we lost five games by a combined 80 points), but as always the rankings and your performance culminate in worthwhile games you can only get better from by playing. After all, that justifies the money you spend on the tournament, no?
I'm not surprised that the 49-52 teams had better PPBs than the 41-48 teams, because of how the format works, and something that I am open to change (keep reading). In 2014, my team pulled an upset or two to earn their way into Tier II, and then was overmatched the rest of Saturday to finish t-47th. On the other hand, a team that just missed a spot in Tier II could easily be stronger and make the top spots in Tier III. This year, again, my team had a difficult pool and beat some strong teams, such that they entered their last prelim game with a chance (albeit a small one, as Ben Stein would say) top make the top tier. What I like about the group format is that everyone spends Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning playing meaningful and competitive games.

If there were something to change, and I'm open to suggestions that meet the restraints of packets and time, I might consider a zipper/ladder-style portion, where the bottom teams of Tier I and top teams of Tier II mingle, so that for instance a team which is placed in Tier II after prelims could finish as high as 21st, while a Tier I team could fall to 28th. But right now, the exact minutiae of ranking #24 vs #25 is not high on a priority list compared to accurately ranking the top 8 and giving everyone an enjoyable and densely-packed experience. Nobody made the last 8 without earning it by playing some very strong teams, and nobody made the top four without having to beat other legitimate national championship contenders.

I am hoping to have the merged and finalized stats posted this weekend, so one last chance to submit corrections. Most of the statistical corrections of the form "I got tossup X but wasn't given credit for it" which have been submitted were not verified on scoresheets.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by jonpin »

I'm going to preface that, again, I do not have 100% confidence that the 48th place team at NSC is better than the 49th place team, and in fact I'd not be in the slighest surprised if they were reversed. There is some softness around the edge of each tier where the true rank of each team may be out of order. Depending on the tournament size in 2016, we certainly may look at ways to merge the lower portion of a tier with the higher portion of another, so that teams are not completely locked into disparate branches at lunchtime on Saturday; this is, however, lower on the priority list than having a sensible and fair format to determine the national champion, which I do very much believe NSC has had the last few years.
no ice wrote:The main goal of a national championship is to determine the best team in attendance, and the NSC format does that more thoroughly than the HSNCT format, as the superplayoffs are more forgiving of upsets and require that the eventual victor will have played each of the other top 8 teams. Obviously, seedings cannot be perfect, but they are necessary and are not what I take issue with. I only wish that a team's seeding and subsequent prelim pool assignment would not dictate how it places at the tournament, because an equally important goal of running a good tournament is to ensure that every team is satisfied with the overall product. When a team blunders and loses games against lesser opponents, it should have no one to blame other than itself if it places lower than it had hoped. However, when the structure of the tournament itself is what prevents a team from reaching its potential, a team has the right to feel cheated in some way.

Though I ended up having fun and enjoying the questions and competition, I maintain that the latter categorization applies to my team. It's true that a team that loses twice in its prelim pool has no chance of winning a national championship, but it is kind of difficult not to lose twice when, in two consecutive games, a player on the opposing team puts up an NSC-record-high 8 powers against us. Our initial expectations of placing in the top 8 or 16 teams can be justified by the fact that we had the 8th highest PPB in the field, that we tied for 8th at the HSNCT a week prior, and that this season we have beaten exactly half of the teams that did make the top 8. For a team with such high hopes, being told that we could place no higher than 25th after only seven matches was disappointing, to say the least; that disappointment was further amplified when weaker teams were able to automatically place higher than us purely by merit of an easy prelim pool.

I honestly don't know if there are any preferable alternatives, and it may be that this is not egregious enough to warrant a new or modified tournament format. My favorite part of a card system like HSNCT's is that all teams can easily overcome being seeded too low by winning more games [...]
Not that I'm divulging exact seeds, but looking at the prelim group you were in, most can tell the second spot was between Hinsdale and Norman North. Caleb had the game of his life, and they beat you, so despite Hinsdale having higher PPG and PPB they ranked ahead of you. The key is that you were ranked against them on the same schedule, and any format that isn't group based throws that out the window from square one. I don't quite follow what you mean by "all teams can easily overcome being seeded too low by winning more games" and how that doesn't happen at NSC. Again, my team has two straight year beaten teams that were seeded ahead of them and thus finished higher in the tournament than they were originally seeded. Shanghai did the same. Conversely, a team that loses to teams that were seeded below them will finish lower in the tournament.
Hyrdofluoric_Acid wrote:yes that may be true but that poses inherent issues for example many teams including us studied a lot right before the tournament and changed significantly. If you go based of of Fred Morlan's rankings TJ should have been tier II or III but was in the top 16. the other thing was that after losing 4 games there was nothing we could do. In the first 5 games we had two that ended within a single tossup and after that we won 11 in a row with no hope of either placing higher than 49th or winning the JV trophy. Although I doubt we could have beat Chattahoochee I think we could have beat Dunbar for second and we would likely have had that opportunity if Stevenson's star player had not left. My issue is there that there are 9 teams that placed above us that neither beat us, or had better statistics than us or beat anyone that beat us, the transitive property of beating. In conclusion to me it would seem that there should either a better way to seed the first pools or like more mobility after the first round. Also just in case it sounds like I am the only one with this issue, it is my firm belief that Hinsdale should have placed above carbondale as they have so often throughout the year and that saratoga probably should have been in tier 1. So yeah overall other than the opening pools the format was great, the questions were fantastic, the hotel was nice, and the experience was wonderful and I hope to comeback next year when I won't even have to fly.
Everyone studies a lot right before the tournament. I don't think a checkbox on the roster form "Did you study a lot this month?" is going to be of much utility in improving the seeding. As to the latter bolded section, this is just unavoidable in any format short of a round-robin or a really substantial fraction thereof. HSNCT certainly isn't immune to such a situation; I did a quick look at a team which was--like Barrington at NSC--the top of a block around the tournament median. Acton-Boxborough was the top 4-6 team at HSNCT and was ranked 169th. They played 9 teams at .500 or better and beat the only 4-6 team they played. I skipped the 5-5 teams and went right to the 6-5 playoff teams which finished 77-104, that is sixty spots above Acton. More than a dozen had lower PPT, PPB, and power rate and did not have a head-to-head or first-degree transitive win over Acton. In fact, three teams went 5-5 and ranked above them despite lower PPT, PPB, power rate AND a head-to-head loss. In particular:

Code: Select all

Rock Bridge A, 5-5, 12-81-15 in 207 TU, 13.66 PPB, 211.1 PP20, opponents went 45-55 with 2 playoff teams and 5 losing record.
Acton-Boxboro, 4-6, 27-79-15 in 218 TU, 16.98 PPB, 267.9 PP20, opponents went 54-46 with 4 playoff teams and 1 losing record.
Head-to-head, Acton won 335-195.
Rock Bridge ranked 30 places higher.

While there surely is some variance based on the packets we play and the good and bad rounds we have, and who winds up stuck in an airport for the first five rounds of the tournament, I'm reasonably confident that if you give me two teams that finished a dozen or so spots apart, the higher-ranked team was truly better last weekend. My overall thesis here is: The group-based format provides by far the most fair determination of a national champion AND an entirely reasonable determination of the ranks of the field as a whole. This is NOT to say that we can't do a better job pre-seeding the morning groups, and suggestions on how to do that fairly are always welcome.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Mike Bentley »

Recordings are now up at: http://doc-ent.com/qbc/NSC15/
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

Hey guys, I've cut the most important section of the All Star game for ringtone purposes here
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Black Miao wrote:Hey guys, I've cut the most important section of the All Star game for ringtone purposes here
RIP in peace headphone users :|

On a more significant note--and I'm not sure if this should go in the discussion thread instead since it doesn't apply specifically to this one NSC--is it possible to record negs in the future, even with the no "-5" rules? I personally find it really interesting for seeing the playing style of players in conjunction with other stats like G/N. I suppose this hinges on an updated SQBS, but on scoresheets I know I was just casually marking a line through boxes where people negged--not deducting points, just noting it, since it also helped to remember to skip the line if both teams negged or couldn't get it.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by Cheynem »

Maybe like "interrupts" which don't count as negs but can still be tracked for statistical analysis? The only debit here would be another, somewhat pointless stat to track and possibly more temptation to hand out negs.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by bsmith »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:is it possible to record negs in the future, even with the no "-5" rules? I personally find it really interesting for seeing the playing style of players in conjunction with other stats like G/N. I suppose this hinges on an updated SQBS, but on scoresheets I know I was just casually marking a line through boxes where people negged--not deducting points, just noting it, since it also helped to remember to skip the line if both teams negged or couldn't get it.
Just speaking on the SQBS point, it is already a relatively simple task for the user to change the value of a neg from -5 to 0 (or -10 or 33 or whatever integer they like), and have the G/N and P/N stats recorded properly. The issue is having scorekeepers remember to note a "0" that is different from the 0s that are given for wrong guesses at the end of a tossup.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by jonpin »

If we ever move away from a paper scorekeeping method, I am all for keeping track of 0s and -0s, but at present, there are already so many different and "inventive" methods of keeping score that the idea of establishing, for instance, "X" indicates a not-a-neg while "0" represents an end-of-question wrong, is not practical in my opinion.
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Re: 2015 PACE NSC: June 6-7, Washington, DC

Post by jonpin »

After wrangling with SQBS about merging a literal baker's dozen of files, and doing some HTML to make it look nice, I can present the final, combined standings from the 2015 NSC have been posted in the database.

Hopefully there aren't any errors remaining (a number of reported stat corrections were checked against the official record and not upheld), but I do thank David Jones for reporting the box score of a game that went missing and James Zhou for reporting a roster correction for Centennial A.
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