01Fans and spectators who are paying to attend a competitive event expect to see the players doing their best throughout a match or tournament. But they often do not get their money's worth.
02"Doing your best" means "to fight until the end for the best possible result." But traditional tournament design often discourages this kind of all-out effort. For whether the final score of the match is 8:1 or 1:0, 6:0 or 4:3, the winner is usually rewarded with the same number of points. Consequently, traditional tournament design encourages players to focus on winning, or getting a tie instead of on achieving the best score. This is the main reason why spectators often start losing interest in a match long before the "final whistle" is blown, and so many of them leave early. For instance, if there are 10 minutes left in an ice-hockey match when the score is 4:0, not even a devoted fan will feel it is disloyal to the team to leave early to avoid the traffic and follow the rest of the match on the radio.
03But it is easy to keep the fans on the edge of their seats for the duration of the event, whatever the score and the match time remaining. This can be achieved simply by giving the proper weight to the spread in points scored. Scores like 5:0 and 2:1 represent entirely different performances, so they should be rewarded accordingly. If we don't want our audience to lose interest at 5:0, we have to give the players of the winning team a strong incentive to keep on fighting to make it 6:0 or 7:0, and the losing team, an equally strong incentive to try and make it 5:1 or even 5:2. Most of all, we want our spectators to see that both sides are performing at their very best:
- whatever the current score
- until the very last second or the last point of the match
- against any opponent
04equTournament and equRanking offer an innovative tournament and ranking system designed to guarantee riveting matches to the very end, in any sport.
