How to determine Naitonal Champions / National Team Members

[Eric Dunn]

I figure there should be some relatively easy way we can determine the national champions / national team members ahead of time enough so that those players willing to travel, can make plans, etc. Something like announce a series of events that will be used in a points race type of scenario, and by a given date, those players that finish the top of the points race, and are able to pay their own way (or the remainder of the cost if we find sponsors) are the ones to go.

Possibilities:
ITSF Ranking
USTSA Ranking
Our own ranking system
Some combination from above

or

award points for highest placing Canadian finishers in Open events at...
any ITSF Sanctioned events
a set of TSAC Sanctioned events (we just pick some)
any event > $10000 prize money
any event in Canada > $1000 prize money

just some ideas i wanted to jot down before i forgot them

[Will Stranks]

When is the next time/date that we have to send in our national champions and world cup team?

[Eric Dunn]

at every table specific world championships, there is a team event - this occurs on all 5 official tables. last year we had teams at the Bonzini World Championships and Torando World Championships. For Bonzini, the players that traveled to that tournament made up their own team. For the last 2 Tornado Worlds we had to have an onsite qualifier between those players in attendance. Personally i do not like this way of assembling our teams - it's best if there was some pre-determined way to know who gets on the team - a ranking system could be real useful here.
- top X players (according to the ranking system) in attendance make up the team.

National Champions and World Cup team members need to be announced around the same time - but when exactly is not known, very likely near the end of the year. There's no guarantee that it will be in France again - and when we'll have to name our players is usually a month or two before the actual event - again - when that event is (and where for that matter) is not known at this time.

[Will Stranks]

well... do you have anything to propose along those lines? I prefer your idea:
any ITSF Sanctioned events
a set of TSAC Sanctioned events (we just pick some)
any event > $10000 prize money
any event in Canada > $1000 prize money

[Earl Nicol]

I don't think ITSF will announce any W.Cup/W.Champ details soon. I think all of that is yet to be decided. The soonest would be January again, I'd guess.

For our purposes it's probably best to devise a system that determines the players sooner than later. Oct 31 was the ITSF deadline for WChamp player announcements last time, when it was held in Jan.

[Eric Goodman]

It will be Tornado Worlds in September unless we want to send a team for the Bonzini Worlds in May.

This begs the question if we setup a blanket points system for the country what do we do when some of our Bonzini specialists from Quebec are in competition with Tornado specialists for positions on the same team? Or for that matter how do we take into account multitable events and multitable players?

I think our multitable players should get preference for multitable events and our Bonzini players should get preference for Bonzini events to a certain extent. But at some point a great Tornado player should get preference over an average Bonzini player at a Bonzini event. The opposite scenario as well.

One way I can see doing this is to have some sort of scaling factor applied to the points that a player has. Say a factor of 0.7 for a table that you do not regularly play on. Which would be confirmed by the TSAC representative of your area. Since some areas of the country travel to more events we could end up with a bias toward a certain area though. I suppose a scaling factor could be applied there as well. Come to think of it though I'm not crazy about this scaling idea it seams like it could start more problems than it resolves(I'm brainstorming here, I apologize if I'm rambling. Its a boring day at work).

Another way would be to run two or more sets of points that would be combined to form a multitable ranking to choose our multitable champions. I could see this working better than my first idea.

Option #3 I'm thinking we could run it like they do the Ryder Cup. Either the executive of the TSAC or a commitee of TSAC selects a team captain/coach. The team would consist half of players who qualify from points/rankings and the other half would be captain's picks.

I dislike the idea of using ITSF points simply because we don't run enough ITSF events to use that points system as a benchmark.

As I said I'm just brainstorming here, the idea is to get some discussion going on the topic.

[Jeff Allen]

I think any sort of rating for multiple tables is not worthwhile at all. Anyone who is really good and really talented will be able to adjust quickly to the other tables (which is who we should be picking anyway). If Tornado is Canada's national table, then that should be what we look at. Although ITSF is somewhat finnicky in their points (the allocation of points when comparing smaller events to the WCS is rediculous), their one asset is that they look at results only from open events only.

[Jeff Tung]

To expand on your scaling idea Eric, we could do what some tennis tournaments do and double the ranking points a player has on a particular surface (table). For instance at a clay court tournament all the players are seeded according to their total ranking points + the ranking points accumulated on clay (so the clay ends up being counted twice, once in the total and by itself).

For a multitable tournament we can apply the same type of scaling with a bit more work. If 15 other teams are present and 4 of them picked Tornado, 6 pick Bonzini and 5 pick Garlando then the scaling could be as follows.

50% of matches are on Tornado because its our table.

Out of the other 50%, 4/15 are on Tornado as well.
50% + 50%*4/15 = 63%

Using similar math we get
Bonzini = 20%
Garlando = 17%

So each table gets scaled up according to how much we expect to play on it. If you want to get really complex you could go even further and top tier team's tables like (France, USA) could be weighted even less. Because we are less likely to play them then we are a C-tier team.

[Earl Nicol]

Remember that TSAC has to announce the team members before all the countries announce their home table. Although it's possible to predict most, I guess.

[Jeff Tung]

Yeah I wasn't sure about that. You could just use the last World Cup. I assume they don't change all that often.

[Jeff Allen]

That being said, I think it is easier to adjust from Tornado to the other tables than vice versa. This is based on what I experienced in Nantes, when comparing my game on euro tables to a Euros first time playing on Tornado.

[Will Stranks]

I agree with that to an extent for sure... however, i think the adjustment to bonzini was difficult at first, just like other players adjusting to tornado. However I think if you are good on bonzini or tornado then adjusting to the other 3 was a piece of cake. I think tornado and bonzini are at almost opposite ends of the foosball table spectrum, and the other tables fall in the middle somewhere. There aren't really any fastball tables that are ITSF certified, although old garlando's and roberto sports were a difficult adjustment for tornado players, the new ones are VERY easy to adjust to.

[derce]

tornado is your home table jeff tung, not the whole country's. It was our country's table when we went to the world cup simply because we had more tornado players than any other table. If a majority of players who went to the world cup were bonzini players, then the tabe would have surely been bonzini. I don't think your automatism of what is our home table is correct. Let me remind you, that for strategical reasons, with the actual team that went to the world cup, it was even though of at the time to choose bonzini as our home table... so it's all relative.

that is why all tables need to be treated the same. For the official itsf tables at least. I understand that having a tournament on an old model of an official table isn't ideal, but we still get a lot of people in our tournaments and the caliber is still very high. And if we had a Warrior tournament that pronounced the national champion this last fall, i wouldn't see any objection as counting at least one of our garlando rwb tournaments for rankings or something like that.

I see that people don't want to pronounce themselves on this subject but i would really appreciate if we did...

oops... i accidentally deleted my last post so people probably won't remember what i was asking. I was asking if tournaments held on non-official itsf tables would also count on a national ranking or count on any way of choosing national champion or world cup team members? In tables like Warrior, or Garlando RWB or even Fabi...