Many thanks to the 42 people who took the time to respond to our Tour survey – the schedule for 2017 is not far away from being announced and it’s been helpful to hear so many opinions. Let’s take a look:
Very glad to see that noone wants fewer events! There are plenty that we could have shoe-horned in somehow to fill out the schedule, and there’s clearly demand for more as all the events with a limit on attendance were fully subscribed – but the quality of the Tour is also important to most of you. We’re also working towards a wider geographic spread next year so that even more of you have a “local” tournament. Of course, too many more and date clashes become a big problem – we’re not yet at the size where two on the same day, even at opposite ends of the country, won’t have a negative effect on each other.
One of the complaints in 2016 was that Intermediates weren’t scoring points – even though players in the affected tournaments were also competing in the single-flight events. Couple this with question 4:
…and here’s where things got a bit confused. In London both Pro and Open divisions counted and there was a feeling that this was rather inconsistent with the no-intermediates policy. Now, the Tour is a free event on top of the individual tournaments and personally I have moved to thinking we should be more inclusive – it’s there to reward people who play regularly and consistently well, not necessarily the elite. With only two events having genuine Open / Intermediate divisions (UK Open, Bristol) it’s clear that us intermediates are going to have to chalk up impressive performances to get big tour scores in any case – it’s not an easy route…
This one was a close run thing. The reason for not counting side events was that it makes some tournaments much more valuable to be at if there’s a whole string of them – it also makes the Tour start to resemble the UK Rankings if every tournament game becomes significant. On the other hand, there’s a case for treating a single-elimination event with a progressive consolation rather more like a double-elimination, so that a single unlucky opening match doesn’t necessarily give you a bad tour score. (The single-elimination format is not so popular these days, with double-elimination and swiss-then-knockout coming to the fore).
Another difficult one – for some, the attraction of a tournament is the prospect of a big prize fund that pays for the expense of attending many times over; for others (myself included!) the entry fee is a sunk cost paid for the enjoyment of a weekend’s backgammon and any prizes are bonuses, and who would be put off by entry fees much over £50. Balancing these two groups is always going to be a tricky call for tournament directors. For the good of the growth of the game we should certainly be encouraging the ‘enthusiastic amateurs’; and the best solution for the Tour is to make sure there’s plenty of variety so that everyone finds at least some locations appealing.
How do you define “intermediate”? The UK Rankings are still a little immature and liable to throw up anomalies if we try to define a hard cutoff. PR is a better way to define playing strength but few of us play regularly at events where our PR is measured, even if we wanted it. And using previous results is a hard on people who really are intermediate but have a lucky run and win a title. All this information is available to TDs to help them identify those who are really out of place in a lower division and a sizeable proportion are happy with TDs knowing best – and in any case we see very little evidence of people deliberately playing below their true level.
Delighted to see a healthy proportion who got out and about this year! 40 in total played four tournaments or more, and special mention to Jon Barnes and Eric McAlpine who completed all eight – that’s devotion to the game!
Once again, thankyou to everyone who took part in the Tour for making it a good inaugural year. We’re hoping that 2017 will be even more successful – stay tuned for details…
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