Another tie-breaker question...

[anniegee]

In a two player round robin tournament with no scores, just win/lose, what is the tie-breaker?

It's not the result of their game (which it should have been), it's not length of membership.

Is it ELO?

[anniegee]

Well, it can't be ELO. Third and fourth also tied, but fourth's ELO is higher.

What else could it be?

[Gulchen]

either head-to-head, or the sum of the scores of the players one beat

I believe BGA uses just the latter, and not head-to-head.


(The point of the ​ sum of the scores of the players one beat ​ tiebreaker is, it makes one's performance
against strong opponents more important than one's performance against weak opponents.)

[Gulchen]

Hmm, I now see that the tournament you played in is a counterexample:


That was created 12 days ago, so it's not as if were some very-old tournament.
It's a round-robin in which each game has a winner and a loser

The ​ "Score difference" ​ shown by clicking the plus is exactly what would be given by having all wins
be +1 and all losses be -1. ​ ​ ​ In particular, the top 2 players have the same value for that column.
Furthermore, I have gone through a replay, and don't see any other indication of there being scores.

There are no players with 0 losses, and exactly 2 players with only 1 loss. ​ In particular, one of those two
players lost to the other of those 2 players, and whoever won that game lost to a player who finished lower.

Thus, the two things from my previous post would break that tie in the same way.
However, BGA - for some reason - broke it in the opposite way.



You might try ​ https://boardgamearena.com/support , ​ in case they will respond to this.

(I have gotten a quick response on something else, but I also seem to recall
seeing long-open threads on tournament tiebreaking that BGA has not answered.)


For ​ https://boardgamearena.com/support , ​ I would do

GAMES & PLAYERS ​ (this explicitly includes tournaments)
then
COMPETITION ​ (again, explicitly includes tournaments)
then
I didn't get any ELO points after my game ​ , ​ ​ ​ since the 2 lower options do not have a
"My problem has not been solved" ​ button, and this one seems closer than the 2 higher options
(it's not ​ ​ ​ "didn't get ELO" ​ , ​ ​ ​ but it is ​ ​ ​ "didn't get 1st place" ​ ,
in the tournament for which you were the administrator)

.

[anniegee]

Thank you, Gulchen!

I will contact them.

[Mathew5000]

Great question! Please let us know in this thread, when you get a response from BGA.

Here's a link to a thread about round-robin tiebreakers from a few months ago: https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27700

[anniegee]

I contacted BGA - their answer:

"There is no tie breaker, and the tournament system has to select winners - so it's a random selection."


They were very prompt in their response, but it was still very disappointing to learn.

I've created a bug report to address this, please vote for it:

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=83143

[Marathir]

It's quite bizzare, but in my experience it's not random - it is decided by when the accounts were created, which is even more unfair.

From a programming perspective, it would make some sense if they missed it. If the score is equal, players may be sorted by player_id, which may be incremented therefore higher for newer accounts.

I've seen others have similar observations, but I can't verify that.

[era13]

This just happened in an Orion Duel round robin tournament I was in where myself and the other top player won 13 out of 14 games. We both loss to someone different but in our match, I won the head-to-head. And yet, he ended up getting 1st Place. Makes no sense. Head-to-head, in this case, should be the first tiebreaker.

[menettm]

I have made a TTR tournament with 4 players games.
The first phase was with groups and the duration was about 1 year and I finish first with best points of my group.
At second phase, only the 2 first of each game were qualified.
On my first game, one player never enter in the game and one other player expuls him after a week when the player became negative.
I was the younger in BGA subscription of the 3 ”winners”, so I became 3rd and I was eliminated.
It was good for all the others players of this tournament because I was the player with the best ELO!
This elimination was unfair, I was eliminated without playing.