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2021 World Sudoku+Puzzle Convention Organizer
Posts: 1801
  
Location: India | Fred76 - 2017-04-09 3:11 PM
- 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").
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. |
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2021 World Sudoku+Puzzle Convention Organizer
Posts: 1801
Location: India | Yuhei Kusui - 2017-04-03 12:17 PM
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.
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'. |
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Posts: 18
Location: United States | 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. :) |
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Playoffs at WSC/WPC 2017
