About tournaments
After reading about the first PS tournaments, writing the PSO20 rulebook and seeing it unfold, I wanted to give some thoughts about tournament structures.
The power of tradition
Then, what are some things that could be changed? Let's see:
#1 - Number of rounds
Classically, a tournament should be long. But why should that be so? Tournament PS heavily emphasizes not recycling, and 10-15 seconds of worthy new material take lots of hours to find and then master. While it's not impossible to do that in 1-month periods or just filming in advance, most spinners don't have that amount of time available. If we want to make tournaments more fun, we probably have to make them shorter.
One of the best things about PSO20 in my opinion and in many other's too are the two 1-round categories — multipen and standup. It has fostered incredibly fresh and creative videos, allowing people to go all out without having to dilute their combos, making it easier for busy people to participate and for all of that I would love to see even more 1-round tournaments in the future.
While I am all for making tournaments shorter in general and all in all more open to innovation, WT would be the exception. WT is extremely long and tiring, has remained mostly unchanged throughout the last decade and yet I feel like that is how it has to be. WT is our staple tournament, the biggest event and while it's extremely hard, it just works. The only thing that WT needs is more promotion and commentary, so people outside the community can follow it more easily.
#2 - Number of spinners eliminated
The WT/WC canon of "half of the spinners advance" has been fading lately for other events, and that is a good thing. Groups (hopefully not too big ones) reduce matchup variance and letting more/less people advance than always 50% of the initial amount gives the organizer some flexibility.
#3 - Judges and scores
Judges are usually required to give scores, but why so? Scores are complete BS most of the time, and if you don't believe so try writing your own tournament score rules and/or give scores to some already existing tournament round videos. Scores are exactly as subjective as just picking your favorite combo. The only thing that scores do is promoting analysis and making bad judges less so. In an ideal world where all judges are decent and can write a few lines on their reasoning, scores would not be needed at all. Since that is not the case, I would also like to see other ways of promoting analysis other than just numerical scores.
Scores also come with a lot of intrinsic biases. The measuring scales for two different criteria aren't usually on par, so a set number of hours dedicated solely to originality may be more efficient than that same amount of time dedicated to difficulty. The effective point ranges are also shorter than what's stated in the rules. Most judges favor moderate scores and shy away from the extremes (no points/full score). This means that two criteria being given 1-5 points and 1-10 points respectively (1/2 ratio), when considered in their effective ranges (let's say 2-4 and 2-9 respectively, 3/8 ratio) make the 5-point criteria less important than what may be initially thought.
On a similar note, difficulty is always included in tournament criteria, but why? Not only is difficulty one of the most subjective criteria of all, but sometimes it's just not what we care about. In aestheticism I gave 0 points to difficulty and while the initial opinions were a bit mixed, I think it turned out fine. This can be said for all criteria, obviously.
A small present
For those who are interested, here you have all the rulebooks I could find. If you have some that I am missing, please message me
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lI_xMsktuFcxPZKsBTFNcWtIxcU7X7ln/view
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