From: DANERUD MARTIN TELIA COM> Date: 1 mar 2001 Subject: SV: Re: Results from Stockholm Open 2001 Dear shogi friends, >Pieter Stouten wrote: > >> Nilsson, Palmgren and Suzuki ended low on SoS exactly because some >> players decided not to play the second day. In fact, several >> tournament organizers strongly encourage players to participate >> during all rounds out of fairness to their opponents. Of course, we did so as well. However, for reasons that I explained in my tournament report, now after the tournament we do not want to stress the few negative details regarding this Japanese visit, since we think that the visit was mainly very good for the Swedish players. I also wanted to point out that we understand the cultural reasons for our guests to act the way they did. >This is exactly my point. This tournament system is strange as if >some players choose to not participate in the entire tournament this >can affect the final position of other players. Are there not other >ways of making this fair? > >> In this particular case, >> Mr. Ito had an opportunity to increase his SoS (and his regular >> score) by playing on the second day. He did not do that and therefore >> ended below Mr. Lindkvist. Personally, I think that is fair. > >I don't. He won the game against Lindkvist and thus should be above him. >(However I see the problem with circular references as Andrew pointed >out). I agree with Pieter. In a Swiss tournament, the mutual result is not used as a criterion to separate the players, since it cannot be guaranteed that the players have met each other, and since in most cases a player has reached his results against opponents, which differ from those of the player with the same number of points. It may actually be the chance that you have played quite a good tournament, even if you do not score so many points. Then the most interesting criterion is how well your opponents have actually scored in order to understand how difficult it was for you to score the points you actually did! The mutual result only gives information about the outcome of one of the games (maybe with an unlogical result), while the SoS gives some information about the conditions of all the games which were played. Best regards, Martin