Monday, March 24, 2003 :::
I was in Iowa this weekend, and as everyone who's never left New York City knows, we barely have running water there, so I didn't see this until this morning. And I thought I'd say something that may not have yet been said.
The most basic element of fairness, I think, is that the rules are known ahead of time. (The second is that all are treated the same. Note that life obeys neither of these.) My picks would definitely have been different if the scoring had been different, and it seems that we ought to play out by the rules we played in by.
On the other hand, there's nothing to stop Kate — or anyone else who's given all of our picks — from calculating the score in as many ways as he/she/it likes. "Number of lines correctly filled in with someone other than the highest seed of the subbracket", "correct picks times ordinal values of the first letter of the team's name", or anything else that seems amusing. Some will be more interesting to more people than others, and if we want to brag about hitting a target none of us was aiming at, I'm sure there's no shortage of such targets we could find. I, for one, am increasingly in a position to want to look for screwy ways in which to improve my standing. In fact, I expect the few points left to be picked up will be picked up by those more conservative than I was; a lot of my picks were designed to be long-shot, big money winners early on, most likely out by the sweet sixteen, and sure enough I've lost three of my final four (two of them earlier than their seeds predicted).
It's been interesting, though, and I think getting an intuitive grip on the novel scoring system was a big part of that. Next year, perhaps a 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 12 scoring system should be tried; I don't like the late rounds being weighed overly heavily, in part because they already are if I can't pick a team to come back from the dead; if I pick the wrong winner for a late round, chances are very good I picked the wrong winner for a game or two before that. Also, though, it seems to favor luck — anything can happen on one deal — over skill — an average over many deals — when the scoring becomes dominated by one or three picks that can go wrong in any number of ways.
::: posted by dWj at 2:04 PM
