What happened in the game I was reading:PACE Gameplay Rules EX.4 wrote:In the event that the answer of a bonus part is revealed before an expected bounceback
opportunity for the non-controlling team, the scorekeeper shall note the issue and the match will
continue. If, as of the end of regulation play, the amount of points which would have been
available to the losing team due to moderator error could affect the win-loss outcome of the
match, a replacement bonus will be read to the same controlling team (See Section E.10), but
with the following modification: if the controlling team gives correct answers to enough parts of
the replacement bonus to obtain the amount of points that it scored on the original bonus, any
remaining bonus parts thereafter are read immediately to the non-controlling team as though the
controlling team had already answered each such bonus part incorrectly.
-- The controlling team got the easy part of the bonus.
-- The controlling team missed the medium part of the bonus, and I incorrectly revealed the answer, denying a bounceback opportunity.
-- The controlling team missed the hard part of the bonus, and the non-controlling team failed to convert the bounceback.
The game was tied after regulation so a replacement bonus had to be read. The order of the parts in the replacement bonus ended up being critical to the game's outcome.
When I read the replacement bonus, the hard part came first and was missed by both teams. The medium part was converted by the controlling team, meaning that they had met their total 10 points from the original bonus, and the third part would be bounced back by default. The third part was, however, the easy part of the bonus, and was thus converted easily on the bounceback, and so the non-controlling team won.
In my opinion this procedure is palpably unfair -- due to an error by me (the moderator), a much more difficult bounceback was replaced by a significantly easier bounceback. Furthermore, it was clearly in the controlling team's interest to intentionally fail to convert the medium part of the bonus -- even if they knew it -- because converting it would not increase their score and would significantly increase their opponents' ability to increase their score. This is a highly unintuitive perverse incentive that I think is clearly undesirable.
To be clear -- and especially given some of my notable forums posting about weird rules edge cases at national tournaments in the past -- I want to make it known that I don't think there was any sort of malice or incompetence on PACE's part in setting up these rules. This is a sufficiently niche issue that I doubt I would have ever thought of if it hadn't happened to me. I do, however, feel really bad about the fact that my failure to remember a bounceback resulted in this ending to a game, and wanted to bring it up because I think there is actually a pretty simple fix.
Specifically, I think in the future, PACE should label bonus parts for the NSC as [H], [M], and [E] (a step many sets have in fact already taken). This would allow the bounceback replacement procedure to be considerably simplified -- if a team was unfairly deprived of a bounceback opportunity on the medium part of a bonus, they could be read a replacement bonus in which specifically the medium part was bounced back to them. (If the medium part didn't come first, the other parts would likely still need to be read in case they provided context, but the moderator could reveal the answers immediately.)
For non-NSC tournaments that use bouncebacks, I would also endorse such a rule. However since such tournaments do not usually write their own sets, I would also encourage a provision to be added to the rules to allow a protest committee to adjudge which parts of the original and replacement bonuses were the easy, medium, and hard parts, and perform the replacement accordingly. Obviously this judgement would not always be perfect but I suspect it would still be significantly more fair than the current situation.