I think the playoffs should be included if the solving could be broadcast live to an audience or if it's done on large boards/grid such as in Beijing with the final 2. If playoffs aren't used, then perhaps later rounds should be worth extra points to allow for more movement in the standings.

Oh no, this is not a smart idea :(

EDIT: Now I am not sure, if I understand it correctly... Did you mean harder puzzles/rounds with more points at the end of the championship or rounds where the points will be inflated (as in the last race of the F1 championship)?
Neither does make sense to me...

Edited by greenhorn 2017-01-15 5:55 AM

Hey Matus,

As you have said there may be two ways to interpret what David said, and we discussed both options.

Having a longer/harder round at the end while releasing partial results to raise the stakes and create anticipation is something we may consider as an alternative to playoffs.
Having a round with inflated points at the end is not something we are considering because in some ways this is what a playoff is without the restrictions on puzzle order selection a playoff has.

We would like to know why you think the former does not make sense. We also encourage David to elaborate his point further to make his thoughts on the matter clear.

It's not evident that a longer/harder round provoques more movement in the standings, in my opinion.
Statistics on previous competition could be done to answer, but I think short round can lead to as much movement in the standings as long round. We have seen in the past lot of cases of very good players loosing lot of points on a short round, because if something goes bad (mistakes for example), the player doesn't have time to recover and the round ends to be catastrophic for him.
In my opinion, long rounds tend more to reproduce the hierarchy, producing less surprise than short rounds.

Fred

It's very hard to balance interest in competition for top players and medium solvers. Leaders gain 2-3 times more points than the middle of the scoring table at WPC - I don't know other sports with such a difference. Having this is hard to be completely concentrated at the second day when you are around 50-th place after the first day - there is no real difference between being 60-th and 30-th. I think that the extension of playoff to more participants could extend interests for the middle of the table. But this extension should not lead to more solving time for leaders. Participant who finished at 30 place should start finals earlier and have less probability to win than leaders.

So one issue the playoff has to get around is that hours and hours of puzzle solving can potentially be overturned very quickly and give potentially unsatisfactory results. For example at the 12016 WPC, it was clear that Ken was by a mile the best solver - the gap between him in 1st and Ulrich in 2nd was as big as Ulrich in 2nd to outside the top 10. My personal view is that the playoffs failed in this case as it doesn't seem right that Ken did not win.

From that point of view, the playoffs has to balance giving a fair advantage to those who deserve it, versus having a competition that is interesting. I disagree strongly with the opinion that playoffs should only give a marginal advantage because it demotes the importance of the main competition. If you are a top solver, and there is no advantage offered by the playoffs at all, then there is an incentive to do just enough to qualify for the playoffs, perhaps to the extent of skipping rounds (Ken could have skipped several rounds and still made the top 10), to make sure that you are well rested and well prepared for the playoffs. Its the kind of thing that would ultimately demean the integrity of the main competition.

On reflection I think having more people in the playoffs is a bad idea. I think that 10 is probably too many, and the playoffs in recent years drag on for too long. If you want to make this media friendly then you probably want no more than 4 people to really focus on. I think in general in 2016 there were too many playoffs, and people who weren't directly involved got bored and did not watch. I suppose it's great for those who otherwise wouldn't be involved, but my feeling was the balance was not right.

One good idea from 2016 I think was the "Tour de Senec" which introduces side competitions alongside the general classification - although as with everything the initial idea can always be refined and improved. I think that the closest sporting parallel to the WSC/WPC is indeed a multi-stage bike race and I think there's good scope to transfer over some of the devices of competition.

One idea that comes to mind is to have the last round delayed until the scores to that point are available - that way the solvers know what they have to do. Then have a mad sprint round to see who comes out on top.

I just want to say that I strongly agree with forcolin's statement that "the playoffs should be videoed and broadcast for the audience (and potentially for TV recording/broadcasting)" and I hope the organizers take that into account if there are playoffs. I fully support something like having a camera focused on each solver's puzzle, while puzzle authors/experts provide live commentary, which is what I hear was well-received at the 2010 Philadelphia WSC.

This is more tentative, but I wonder if live-streaming the playoffs would be a good idea. I dunno whether people not at the WSC/WPC would be interested in watching, but if you had live commentary while puzzles are being solved, and maybe interviews with the finalists or more commentary during downtime, I imagine it could be very entertaining (at the very least, I have a bunch of friends who'd enjoy watching something like this). You could also keep the videos for posterity, which helps with another publicity problem: there are almost no videos of previous years' championships, at least none that I can find. I would love to be able to search youtube for "world puzzle championship" and find videos of top puzzlers competing, but doing that right now only gives me some WSC 2012 videos and Stefano's recording of the WPC 2014 team playoffs.

Oh, what a terrible news! Actually, for me this is not so bad because I've never done much in the playoffs, but I am afraid that this decision could kill the essence of sudoku and puzzle world championships. I still hope that you will reconsider the decision and change it.

Spacing the rounds nicely? I can't believe it...
This is the World championship, not a holiday.

Edited by greenhorn 2017-04-01 3:56 PM

Just as a counter point, I like to hear the focus on spacing the rounds nicely. The schedule is one of the things that made me enjoy Beijing and London quite a bit more than Sofia and Senec. It would be good if you did not feel to have to say cut a team round from an adequate hour to 40 minutes just to fit in the schedule, and instead give a few more teams the chance to finish!

Playoffs give solvers, say, in positions 10-20 some incentive to try hard during the last few rounds to gamble and play aggressively to qualify for that top 10 finals.
Without this, would be a shame :(

At the present moment I can't say excluding play-off is a bad decision because I don't know what "good alternatives" are; they should be revealed as soon as possible, as new ideas require plenty of time to be understood.

Edited by Yuhei Kusui 2017-04-03 12:24 PM

Playoffs is equivalent to the finals of a Championship.

And playoffs must involve a good majority (if not all) of the participants. But, off late, very few people turn up for the playoffs...because there is probably nothing to watch. Except for the players and the organizers, others have minimal involvement with the event. Except for the knockout playoffs in 2012, which appealed to some extent to the audience.

So, it may not be a bad idea to have a championship without a playoff and see how it works.

And, having multiple playoffs - for Sudoku GP, WSC, Puzzle GP and WPC - brings down the interest levels as well. In 2016 also, there were a bit too many playoffs perhaps. The two playoffs for the GP should be good enough and the remaining time can be utilized to probably execute something more interesting and, more importantly, which involves a majority of the community.

I agree with Anonymous that maybe there is too much playoffs. I suggest to cancel live GP finals from 2018. Grand Prix is a tournament, an excellent one, but only a tournament and we are bringing it here because it is an annual world meeting. Please, be honest with yourself, who wants to replace their participation in world championship finals with the participation in the tournament playoff?

WSC and WPC playoffs are great culmination of biggest world events and they must be preserved. Formats of the playoffs should be altered every year since, as I already said, the perfect system is not invented yet.

I agree

It's a courageous decision, that breaks the tradition.

Please let me do a few comments (in english, sorry for the non english-speakers):

• Do you have the consent of the WPF Board for doing that?
  The current document (guidebook) mentions explicitly the playoffs, and although we can be sad by the poverty of the document, it seems that the decisions of the board are actually taken based on that document ("The guidebook does not currently have restrictions on Sudoku vs Non-Sudoku elements of the WSC, so in the end it is a personal opinion you hold").


• I strongly disagree with the opinion that this competition really need playoffs:
  If we make analogy, we have to admit that the playoffs in other sports are very different competition. All the examples that come to my mind are sports where players or teams fight against each other, with direct elimination (it's possible to do similar things (2012) with puzzles, but it's not the purpose of the whole world championships, you can't ask a player to come and then be eliminated after having solved 2 or 3 puzzles, so it's possible only for the playoffs), and most of cases are annual competition. While it makes sense to say the best one of the season is the one who is the best at the end of the season, I don't see any reason to say that the best sudoku/puzzle player of the year is the one who is the best in the last 30 minutes of a 2-days competition.
  The more accurate analogy with sport is a run involving lot of people. And here I've to say that I sometimes have the impression that the WSC/WPC playoffs would be similar to organize a 400m run with the 10 best marathon runner. Or make the winner of the Tour de France be the one that win an extra stage consisting of climbing the Ventoux.
  In the few recent WSC/WPC playoffs, best players had to solve 4 or 5 puzzles in the final. Finally who is the best player? The one who was the best in solving the 100+ puzzles of the 2 days competition or the one who was the best at solving the last 4 puzzles? This issue led the organizers to think about system that favour the best players of preliminary rounds. But then it's very hard to find the right balance between fairness and excitement. And in my opinion all system invented yet look artificial.
  Another problem which comes specifically with our discipline are the puzzles themselves: We all know the result of a competition is depending on which puzzles are to be solved, especially when the competition (the final) contains only 4 or 5 puzzles. If you get another set of puzzles, you'll potentially have another world champion. The question then comes: Who is more important at world championship: players or authors?
  


• We could do a list of issues that appears in the recent playoffs. It was mentionned that the perfect system is not yet found. This is worst than that. To take few examples:
  -2012: If I remember well, some players specify before the competition that they'll consider that the world champion is the best player of preliminary rounds, because they didn't find that the system was fair. There was an issue in the quarter final of WSC.
  -2013: No real issue here, but we can ask ourselves what was the purpose to eliminate players after 3 and 6 puzzles in the semi final. Moreover the "run throuh the tables and see if there is one more free" was particularly ridiculous.
  -2014: Issue in the final of WSC, which led to give two bronze medals.
  -2015: No particular issue (!), but the audience could not see how the players solved the puzzle, and it is my personal opinion that it was quite boring for the audience.
  -2016: There was so many playoffs that the time limit had to be very strict, which led the final of WSC to be finished by only one player. I think the final should be finished only after the 3 best players completed all puzzles.
  


• The GP final seems to me to work far better. The sport aspect has more meaning:
  -It's a yearly competition, and not a 2-days competition.
  -It's more different than the preliminary rounds that are online, thus having small time gap between players is not a problem, it leads to an exciting and fair competition.
  -The finalists play under the same conditions, which is potentially not the case in the online rounds (fast/slow printer, noise/external disturbance, speed to enter the codes, etc..)
  -The whole format seems to work well so far.

So in my opinion, if one of the playoff should be remove, it's better to be the world championship playoffs than the GP finals. I agree with the fact we need such competition with the best players during WSC/WPC, it can be excited, but it also should be used by the WPF to make more advertizing/promotion.

Fred

Hi Fred,

I checked in with the WPF Board on behalf of the organizing team earlier this year about a few things, including this topic of whether playoffs are a must. I also communicated to them that we plan to have a poll to this end. The Board confirmed that playoffs need not be held and that the organizers can make a decision either way, and it was only after this that we started the poll.

Hi Yuhei,

The alternative we are thinking of has been mentioned before, but I will elaborate once again. We are going to have an evening event, a Player vs Player knockout event open to everyone. As I have indicated before, we have a set system for this which worked at the National level last year and we are confident we can replicate that. This event will be exciting, fun, can be used for media and publicity, and most importantly, everyone can participate without worrying too much about 'fairness' and 'choosing a worthy World Champion'.

I'm very very late to this discussion but I highly approve of the removal of playoffs. In my opinion, the playoffs have never been a good indication of choosing the best solver. Everyone has just gone through a dozen rounds of competition, and the dozen rounds are then condensed into less than 5 minutes of playoff advantage time. It would be like if you gave students a test, and the first 100 questions were worth 5% of their grade while the last 10 questions were easier questions and worth 95% of their grade.

The advantage of playoffs have always been for the spectators, to see what the best puzzle-solvers in the world can do, and a little bit for the players in position 10-20 to feel like they still have a chance of catching up and getting just the right amount of luck. But as the WPC puzzles become less and less accessible to the majority of casual viewers, they cannot understand what they are seeing in the playoffs. Without the playoff-solving being on camera, there is even less for the viewers to see. Ever since I stopped being good enough to qualify for playoffs, I discovered that I really didn't enjoy watching the playoffs. I would much rather take the playoff puzzles and solve them by myself. :)