Tournament Rules

[marcus]

Hi all

Have been a memeber since October when I received Carc as a present and now have all but two of the expansions, I would like to know if anyone has come up with some tournament rules baised on number of players how many points for a win, loss or draw.

I help out each year at a local Game convention and would like to maybe run a Carc tournament over the couple of days.

Any help would be appreciated.

Marcus

[koolkat]

Perhaps if you visit BGG you'll find something, but you can always make your own house rules...

[Lardarse]

You could just have it be all 2 player games, and then do 5 or 6 rounds of Swiss, possibly with the top 8 doing single elimination afterwards.

[Scott]

Has anybody ever played in a Carc tournament? Is there some standard way of doing it in Germany?

[Lardarse]

I know the people that came second and third in the Australian CC champilnships in 2008, so I could ask them about the format.

Edit: Looks like I was right with my guess of Swiss KO. But it looks like they use chess clocks as well.

[Novelty]

The Carcassonne World Championship was played in Essen in 2008.  The rules are here.

[Scott]

Thanks for the link Novelty.

[marcus]

Hi guys

Many thanks for the info, I'm looking into running a carcassone tournament at the next Convention in Leeds, UK later in the year will post information when I know more.

Marcus

[Lardarse]

Is that going to be the convention that I think it will be?

[marcus]

Lardarse

depands if you mean the one run by Patriot Games then yes I hope to see if this can be arranged

Marcus

[Gantry]

That would be great, marcus, keep us posted!

[Scott]

It looks like the page has been taken down, but Google Cache still has it:
http://209.85.173.132/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww2.herne.de%2Fspielezentrum%2Fcarcassonne%2FCC-2008Engl%2Fe-ccs-rules2008.html&meta=lr%3D

Some interesting reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_tournament
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tie-breaking_in_Swiss_system_tournaments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchholz_system

Some seriously hardcore reading:
http://www.fide.com/fide/handbook?id=18&view=category

I've been trying to write an explanation of how a Carc tournament works in my own words for over an hour now, but I'm having a hard time explaining how the pairing works. I even tried drawing it in Visio but that failed miserably, partly because it's not elimination-style, and partly because I don't fully understand it myself. I really want to see this in the Complete Annotated Rules, and I was planning to put it in the CAR for H&G as well.

[Lardarse]

The Swiss system, in simple terms:

First round is a completely random draw. So you could play just about anyone that entered. If there is an odd number of players, then one of them gets a bye (which counts as being a win without them playing). Scores come in, with whatever scoring method (generally 1 point for a win, and 0.5 for a draw).

For the second round, winners from the first round play against winners, losers against losers, and those that drew will possibly play each other, respecting the immutable law of Swiss tournaments that you will never play against a player twice. This means that if only one game was drawn, then they won't be able to play against each other. There are other reasons why players that drew might not be able to play against other players who drew, but these are usually related to the number of players in the tournament. If there are an odd number of players, then the lowest player gets the bye. For games where the starting player matters, the draw will try to make sure that players play "white" and "black" and equal number of times.

The third round and onwards follow the same idea as the second round, namely that you will play someone on roughly the same score as you (with the bottom player receiving a bye if there are an odd number of players), while never meeting the same player twice, and respecting the "colour rule" as necessary. It is at this point, though, that the tiebreaker systems start to have a stronger influence in position. The first tiebreaker is generally a measure of how tough your games have been, with the idea being that if the people that you have played against are winning more games than they have lost, then you have played stronger opponents than if they are losing more games than they win. The Buchholz system is possibly the simpliest, which is something along the lines of "add the tournament scores of all of your opponents". While this method is not completely without flaws, other methods of measuring "strength of schedule" are more complicated. Other tiebreakers used can be even more complicated, though.

Eventually, the desired number of rounds will have been played. For a tournament which is just Swiss, the top player is then declared the winner. However (and especially so for tournaments of a high stature), Swiss is often used as a method of setting up one or more rounds of single elimination, where the top players will play a final (with possibly a semi-final or even quarter finals, depending on the tournament). This is a common combination, and may often be referred to as "Swiss-KO".

There may be differences on how the tournament happens, as well as variants of the Swiss system that are sometimes used, but this is a rough idea. It is also abstracted slightly from the game that's being played. Any questions?