I'm reproducing here an idea I've had while discussing tournament rules via PM with Victor Narl and also commenting in Telegram. This is something I'm considering for Race For Kicks, but could be useful for other competitions or events of more than one race, so I'm share it in case anybody may find it useful or would like to comment on its potential (positive or negative) effects. I'm curious about anything you have to say about it.
The idea is simply that, in a given competition of more than one race with a point system for individual race and a final season scoreboard, each pipsqueak gets their points doubled for the race in which they've achieved the most points.
The guys in Telegram have compared it to ZakStunts discarding rule, a relation I hadn't thought about. It does sound common in its way of being applied, but I think the effects are very different.
My intention is that the doubling rule will have virtually no impact on pipsqueaks that usually are in the podium or near, but for pipsqueaks that are capable of more than they usually give, but normally don't do their best because their season position is discouraging and there's no incentive, pipsqueaks typically in the middle of the scoreboard, it may be very relevant. For a pipsqueak like this, it would always make sense to put more effort in an individual race because a single result better than any other previous result in the season will pay much more and give them a chance to change their seasonal standing.
So, any comments or idea on it are appreciated :)
This is an interesting idea for a bonus! Some scattered thoughts:
- Besides the resemblance of the mechanics with discards (both involve counting some result a different number of times than once), this doubling rule also has one of the effects of discards, if to a lesser extent: compensating for a bad result with a good one. Doubling, of course, would reward an exceptional result in a way discards dont't.
- Having doubling and multiple discards in the same ruleset could become too much to keep track of. However, I can see having exactly one doubling and one discard working fine -- it would become a straight swap.
- Doubling rewards exceptional results over consistency. However, if it's just one race in a season I don't think that would be a major issue, specially in a competition without multiple discards or other kinds of bonuses.
- A distortion doubling could introduce is that, if the number of pipsqueaks changes a lot from race to race, there's a chance the best result wouldn't be very representative, if it were attained against too few pipsqueaks. One way to entirely avoid this issue, though, might be adopting CCC's scoring-from-the-bottom system.
Especially the last point is very interesting. I've always been thinking about the problem of the variable length scoreboard. It'd be good to devise a scoring system that were independent of the number of participants