How to Equate Team and Pair Events

The Overall Awards

"Tables" should be replaced with "competitors" in the existing formulas. Then a pairs event with 40 pairs will give the same overall awards as a team event with 40 teams. As it should be.

If 80 people show up, they could be 40 pairs or 20 teams. For those two to be award the same masterpoints per person, the formula must equate masterpoints per person across field size. The current tournament formulas favor a small field, so there would still be an advantage for team games, but it would be smaller, and anyway the discrepancies across field size should be changed.

Section/Match Awards (SMA)

Balancing overall does not necessarily balance total awards, because there could be a disparity betweent the section awards in the pairs events and the match awards in a team game (which I will call the SMA points).

Technically, the two events should be balanced for total points, but they should also be balanced for gold points.

For one Regional Senior event, I calculated that the pairs event offers about 1.00 masterpoints per person in section awards and the Swiss team event offers 1.28 masterpoints per person in match awards. This suggests that the SMA further aggravating the discrepancy between team and pair events.

However, not all of these SMA are actually awarded -- they are not given out when the overall award is higher. I suspect that this will further aggravate the difference between team and pair events, but the calculation/estimation is difficult.

So, one could ignore the SMA and for now just balance the overall awards. But it would be better to try to consider the SMA when trying to balance the two types of events. I think the match award in a Swiss team is still a little too large, undermining the integrity of masterpoints. This would seem an ideal time to reduce that award.

Masterpoints