That would also address potential confusion if there had been a third place under prize that was slightly less than the fourth place overall prize. Tied players are supposed to bring into the tie the highest value prizes for which they are eligible, but the three U2400s would get more in a three-way split of the three under prizes (even though that does not involve the four most valuable prizes available to the four players) than in a four-way split of the two under prizes, 3rd and 4th.
I don’t think you are missing anything obvious.
Until this is resolved it might be nice for organizers concerned about it to post something similar to your proposed wording before round one. I doubt that such a posting would be a major variation that would need advance publicity(particularly since it some may argue that it is a clarification rather than a variation).
After the word more please insert “from the division of those prizes”. That avoids muddying the waters with people saying things like a best game bonus counts towards that cap.
I’m more than a little uncomfortable with that definition and simply rejected it.
It does, however make the issue debatable enough to try to make an argument based on rule 1A (In situations not explicitly covered, the tournament director can usually reach a fair decision by considering similar cases and applying their principles analogously.)
This is a relatively straightforward (not simple, but straightforward) calculation. Any situation where the prize eligibility is nested (as it is here - the U2400’s are eligible for all prizes and the 2400+'s are eligible for just the place prizes) admits one and only one solution as long as you always take the prize that has the largest eligibility set first when you have two with equal value. It’s when you have eligibility sets which don’t nest (Class A rather than U2000, woman, youth) that you can run into problems with different solutions depending upon which of several prizes someone receives.
The way to work this out is to concentrate on the people who aren’t eligible for prizes rather than those who are. As it says in the following comment line:
//
// Generate all subsets which are intersections of the complements of eligibility sets.
//
In the case of the 4-2, the three U2400’s are eligible for the Under’s and the 2495 isn’t. So the only complement of an eligibility set is {2495}. The best he can get is $536. That doesn’t mean that that’s what he’ll get, just that that’s the best he can get. So tentatively take the 3rd place out of the mix. {2391,2387,2385} are all eligible for 4th, and the two Unders: total of $2451, average of $817. Since this is more than $536, we’re done. If it had been less than $536, then we would have to look at {2495,2391,2387,2385} as a single group, add up the highest four prizes that they can bring in, and divide it up.
I am also uncomfortable with that definition, because eligibility exists BEFORE the tournament. Is a player eligible for 1st place? YES. Is he also eligible for 2nd place? OF COURSE.
Therefore, ALL players are eligible for ALL place prizes, though no-one can win more than one.
I have to go with SwissSys on this one. The rule makes it clear that, by virtue of being tied with those who are eligible for a restricted prize, the 2495 can share in that prize for which he is not eligible.
It needs to be scrapped, not clarified. Any time a player rated xxxx or over can win part of an under-xxxx prize, something is wrong, and the rule has not been thought out carefully.
How about you read the logic above. It has nothing to do with whether the 2495 can or can’t “share” in the U2400 money. In fact, I say that if the numbers were different you would do exactly that. The point is that the 2495 shouldn’t make more than 3rd prize since that’s the highest prize for which he’s eligible.
If we change the prize distribution so that the 4 prizes that are relevant are
3rd 600
4th 400
1st U2400 500
2nd U2400 300
then if look at the {2495} alone, he would get $600 and the three U2400’s would get $1200/3=$400. So that doesn’t work. Instead, they all split $1800 or get $450 each. So how does that square with the rules? {2495} is eligible for the 3rd and 4th. What he gets is 1/4 x $600 + 3/4 x $400. The other three are eligible for all four prizes. They each get 1/4 x $600 + 1/12 x $400 + 1/3 x $500 + 1/3 x $300. So, in fact, {2495} doesn’t actually get a share of a prize for which he’s ineligible, it just looks like he does.
Again, the player rated over 2400 is not getting any of the under 2400 prize money. If you sum the 3rd, 4th, 1st U2400, and 2nd U2400 prize money and divide evenly, the player rated over 2400 is getting all of the third place prize and a portion of the fourth place prize.
As imperfectly as it stands now, rule 32B3 ensures that a player rated xxxx or over does not win any under-xxxx prize money (the “blue” and “pink” currency argument from above).
Steve Immitt and I have submitted essentially the same ADM to address rule 32B3. (Yes, the two ADMs will both appear in the Delegates Call, Steve’s immediately following mine.) Neither of us knew the other would submit the ADM.
Does the wording of the rule need to be improved? Yes. But it’s still the case that if you give the 2495 the full share of the highest prize for which he’s eligible, then he’s not eligible for anything else. The 3 U2400’s then do better by splitting the rest.
Eligibility is not determined by one’s score in the tournament, but by one’s situation before the tournament. We do not use POST-tournament ratings to decide who is eligible for UNDER prizes.
The rule is quite clear that a player in a tie can share in a prize for which he is not eligible. As others have pointed out, he is getting one-fourth of four prizes. One-fourth of four is still one. That one of those U2400 prizes in which he shares are larger than his third place prize is not his fault, but that of the organizer.
The rule-makers did considered the possibility that an organizer would have under prizes out of proportion to the place prizes, and wrote a recommendation against it, 33B: “Generally, place prizes should be higher than class prizes, both to award the relative excellence of the chess played and to avoid distribution problems.”
There follows, “In major tournaments, the top prizes for classes or rating-based lower sections are often higher than the lower place prizes…” (Emphasis mine.)
In this case, the 1st U2400 prize was larger than the 2nd Place prize, and the 2nd U2400 prize was larger than the 3rd Place prize.
It seems to me that the problem arose because the organizer disregarded those recommendations. The authors obviously considered the possibility of out-of-proportion “under” prizes, as shown by recommendation 33B, but still did not write rule 32B3 in such a way that those not in the “under” category were limited to the highest place unrestricted prize they had won.
Jack, you also need to look at rule 32B1, which says that no winner shall receive more than one cash award. I and others interpret this to mean that a player in a tie can’t win more than the highest prize for which he/she is eligible, in this case clear third. For the actual prize distribution click here. Tournament details are posted here.
This was argued to death last year and I don’t want to spend more time on it now. As Ken Ballou said there are two similar ADMs addressing this rule, so it can be debated in Madison at the Rules Workshop and possibly the Delgates Meeting.
I do not have my rule book at hand, but my recollection is that 32B1 says that no winner shall receive more than one cash award if he is the clear winner of one of those awards, but that he may share in awards for which he is tied. In this case, he is NOT the clear winner of 3rd Place.
That’s fine. For me, however, I find it time well spent. These sorts of discussions make me examine the rules more closely, which is always beneficial for those of us with less experience.
Go back and read all of the previous replies in this topic, and study them in comparison with the rulebook. Others have made the same arguments that you have. Some experienced TDs agree with you, and other experienced TDs disagree with you. What it comes down to is that the rules are ambiguous and need to be clarified.
This is actually a useful lesson for an inexperienced TD: that the rules aren’t always clear-cut and sometimes you just have to make a ruling according to your best judgment, being prepared to defend it if challenged.
That part of the rule is poorly worded. Everyone admits that. It was worded even more poorly in the 4th edition where it only talked about “class prizes”. However, by general principles, the 2495 can’t receive more than the highest prize for which he is eligible. Period. No clumsy attempt to explain how to handle prize classes that do better on their own can change that.
What complicates this case is not that the under prizes are high relative to the place prizes. After all, usually by the time you get to the score group with under prizes, you’ve given all the highest place prizes. Here, because the “Under” covered all but a handful of players in the tournament, the score group has 3 under players and only 1 not. The way a (good) TD would usually handle the prize distribution for this would be to compute the average of all four, then look at distributing the under prizes in isolation. If the latter gives the under players more than the former, you give them the under prizes; if not, everyone shares the average. (Of course, in many cases, it’s clear without doing any calculation that the Under’s do better on their own). That is what the rulebook describes, and that generally works—typically the under prizes are much higher than the remaining place prizes and the players not eligible for them are much more numerous than those that are. Here, there is only one “over” player and two place prizes, so the calculation of the share for the under players in isolation needs to include the lower place prize, since there’s no one else available to take it.
A better way to describe the process of allocating the money which is mathematically the same, but avoids the semantic problems from the current wording is to pull the class aside, and let the others (first) take as much money as they can under their eligibility rules. Then have the class take what’s left under their eligibility rules. If the average for the class is greater than the average for the non-class, then it (per force) must be higher than the average from combining everyone.