How are the alliances and schedule for qualification matches created at tournaments? Is there a process or software/programs that must be used to make sure the match-ups are random? Can event planners manipulate the qualification match ups in any way to make the competitions “better”?
The VEX Tournament Manager software generates it with an algorithm. It is random and ensures that teams don’t have back to back matches or play with the same teams if possible.
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The teams are assigned randomly by the software “Tournament Manager”
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It’s also worth noting that the Tournament Manager software is freely available from vextm.dwabtech.com.
You can always download it yourself if you want to see exactly how it works.
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Thank you for the information. I will check out the software if I have time. I ask because I was in a tournament last weekend where we had 6 qualification matches, and every alliance partner we had finished in the bottom half. While I know we affect the outcomes for our partners as much as they do ours, we really had it tough since we were usually the only ones using the autonomous rounds and were doing most of the scoring on offense. Our skills points and autonomous points were significantly higher than those of the teams that finished near us.
I am not saying that a couple better partners would have changed much, as we were not as good as any of the top 12 teams or so, but we could not help but feel that we were little more than interesting cannon fodder.
We’ve all been there.
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The randomness of pairings is why we have our top teams work equally hard on teamwork, skills, and notebooks. If you have the most routes to qualification possible, you can try to mitigate the luck component.
We actually have calculated “pairing strength” and at a recent IQ tourney (8 matches/2 drops) it made a 9 point difference in TW average scores. This would be enough to move teams from 5th to 11th. So it’s usually bad enough that a top team will still end up in the top few places, and top 5 team in the top 10, and on the other hand a top 15 team has a chance to be in the top 10 for finals.
What’s even more frustrating is that for our area for the top ranked skills teams, their pairing ranks (out of 22) were 20th, 17th, 14th, 13th, and 19th; for those coming from a rival area, for their 3 teams their top team had 3rd best followed by 8th and 10th. It’s definitely possible to do multiple draws of pairings, and afaik no one checks or reports on this- would be a nice transparency move to do it “in front of the audience.”
We’ve often speculated that an algorithm that uses block randomization based on strata of skills scores would be lovely, as would one that puts some schedule gaps so that teams in small tournaments can get to skills runs (in 24 team tourneys, it’s basically impossible). Even just including four “dummy teams” whose matches then get deleted would likely make this possible though I’m sure there are plenty of better ways to do this algorithmically.
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