Andy’s New Age Kubb: Thinking Outside the Box

It has been said that often the traditional qualification rounds format (Swiss/DMK/TD) can give a slightly easier path into the top eight to teams that lose the first round of the day. In general, I believe that’s only true if you win your second-round game. By contrast, if you start off with a couple wins in a row, you may be playing tougher teams in the following rounds, but those wins you got early are going to count in the end. For this reason, I don’t see much (if any) advantage to “throwing” a game at any time. It’s the wins that count, regardless of the caliber of the opponent you are facing. If there are seven qualification rounds, and a team is 6-0 going into round seven, chances are they have played most of the highest eight to 10 other teams vying for the seven remaining spots in that top eight. It’s also probable that one of the teams sitting at 4-2 or 3-3, currently on the bubble for a top eight berth, is their opponent for the seventh round. Personally, I believe it’s better to win as many as you can early, so you can get the better teams out of the way. Even if they beat you, you won’t have to be playing them with a top eight berth on the line. I could certainly go on with possibilities, but I believe you get the gist.

Within the last year, two different kubb scoring systems have been invented. It began about a year ago when Steve McDiarmid (Kettle Moraine Kubb) bounced an idea off me (and a handful of others) that we should look for a way to give people credit for knocking down kubbs in a losing effort. The basic idea was to give a score based on the number of kubbs knocked down for each team. A game that would go to 10-in-play with a toppled king for the win would be scored 6-5. As it stands, in theory, a team (BRUISERS) that lost every qualifying game 6-5 would finish at 0-7. A team (BANGERS) that hadn’t knocked a single kubb down all day, except the game against the BRUISERS where they played the best game of their lives to squeak out that 6-5 win, finishes with a record of 1-6. Now if that was a nine team tournament, the BANGERS are going to be the eighth seed, while the (likely immensely frustrated) BRUISERS are going to fall short of the top eight. They knocked down 35 kubbs on the day, which was the most of any of the nine teams, they just had the bad luck to run into every other team in their best game, while the rest of the field had their share of both wins, and big losses. A final standing (with toppled kubbs as a tiebreaker) could, hypothetically, look something like this:

Bummer—BRUISERS knocked down more wood than anyone, but missed the cut. So, if we use the scoring system to set the standings instead, it will put the Bruisers as number one seed and slide everyone else down one spot. One way places total value on wins, while the other places the most value on the entire day of play, without regard to record. The latter also takes “backing in” to the top eight out of the equation. Of course, that was the most extreme end of the spectrum, and its likelihood of fruition would be almost non-existent. Recently, an article about Steve’s application at the Kubbapalooza Ice Games showed the changes between traditional seeding and the scoring method to be present, yet not nearly as drastic.

At my Spring Fling Scrambler tournament last June, I employed a scoring system that was similar to Steve’s (as well as based on his original idea). The difference was that the toppled king was worth 5 points to each member of the winning team. In this way, a team that toppled all five kubbs and the king would receive 10 points, while the losing team would get anywhere from 0 to 5 points. We had five ties (12 players) to settle with throw offs, but with a field of 36 players, that was a marked improvement over the year before, when under the traditional method, 22 of the 24 players were involved in throw-offs to settle ties. There were some in-depth ideas to address a variety of situations that may have arisen, but I have no plans to use that particular scoring method again, so I’m not going to bore you with those details at this time.

In conclusion, scoring systems seem to be a better fit for scrambler-type tournaments than traditional team tournaments, if only because it helps cut down on the number of ties (at least it did for mine). Going with throw-offs to settle ties seemed to be the best way to do so, as I had a hard time figuring out how to employ “opponent score” without some Newtonian calculations and formulae. Sadly, I never got passed trigonometry, so calculus does me look like a knockerhead. 

I did find this appropriate quote, however: