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Nvidia Geforce forfeit wins

Hi everyone,

Like (I'm guessing) many of you, I am competing in the Nvidia Geforce Hearthstone tournament. Yesterday, I was awarded a forfeit win (no-show opponent).

Beware, math ahead.

According to the Nvidia website, there are currently 8942 amateur players enlisted, who play each other swiss style over 8 rounds. After those 8 rounds, a little over 30 players will have a perfect 8-0 record. Of those 30 players, the top 16 will advance to the mixed Pro/amateur brackets. Players with the same match record are ranked according to Game Differential (wins-losses) which seems fine. But this does mean a players' win-loss record is very important. For those few 8-0 players (of which I will very probably not be one at the end) every win and every loss counts.

Back to my situation. A forfeit wins counts as 0-0. It does not contribute to Game Differential. A normal win always has a GD off at least 1. Meaning I (and people like me) will almost certainly not be able to obtain the same game differential as someone that played all 8 matches without receiving forfeits. This feels unfair: having a single no show opponent (not my fault) means I am practically eliminated from playoff contention.

I ask Nvidia to change the result of a forfeit from 0-0 to 3-0. This would be more fair in my opinion.

I will also mail this to the tournament organizers.

  • bdrago
    Posted 10 years, 9 months ago (Source)

    We have a similar issue with table top wargame tournaments.

    Everything runs swiss style, with second tiebreaker (First being number of wins) being Strength of Schedule.

    You get 1 point for every win that your opponents have. So if you've played 4 rounds and your opponents have 3 wins, 3 wins, 2 wins and 1 win, you get 9 as your SoS score.

    The problem with this is SoS doesn't account for drop outs or "Bye" rounds (Basically the same as a no show).

    There is no perfect solution, and somebody in the tournament somewhere along the line will lose out based on the system.

    The problem with this is SoS doesn't account for drop outs or "Bye" rounds (Basically the same as a no show). There is no perfect solution, and somebody in the tournament somewhere along the line will lose out based on the system.

    In your system you could make the SoS tiebreaker more fair by dividing the total number of wins their opponents have by the number of "real" matches played (not counting byes or no-shows).

    SoS tiebreaker = (sum of opponent's wins) / (number of actual matches)

    For example, if you ran an 7 round tournament and a player received a bye in the first round, their tiebreaker would be: (sum of opponent's points) / 6

    A similar tiebreaker logic would have improved the Nvidia Hearthstone tournament, but doesn't fix the problem that they didn't plan for enough rounds for the number of entered players.

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