01The parents of juniors who participate in tournaments drive their kids to and from, spend their time watching their kids play, and pay the bills. In exchange for their efforts, the first thing parents should expect is that their kids will benefit from the tournament no less than anyone else's kids, that is, they expect their kids to experience and learn from the tournament environment as much as other kids do.

02Unfortunately, this is not possible in the traditional elimination system. Take a tournament with 64 participants. Half of them, 32 players, will only get to play one match before they are eliminated in the first round. Of the remaining 32, 16 participants will get to play only 2 matches, and only 8 will end up playing 3 matches. Only 8 of the original 64 entrants will get to play 4 or more matches. These last 8 participants are usually the better players, of course. Consequently, in the elimination system precisely those players who are already better than the others get to play the largest number of matches and thus to benefit most from the tournament, while the weaker players benefit the least. This is not fair to the players, nor the parents and coaches who have invested so much time and energy in the success of their kids. With equTournaments, parents can rest assured that all kids will have an equal opportunity to benefit from the tournament. In our tournament design, every kid is guaranteed a certain number of matches to play and that number is sufficient to justify the effort made by the parents.

03A second essential goal for most parents is to give their child a chance to improve his or her game-playing skills. But the parents, coach and junior player often disagree on the junior's performance and on what is needed to improve on it. The more often the junior player can test those skills and try to improve them, and the more opportunities the players, parents and coaches have to analyze the results and exchange opinions about them, the easier it will be to resolve such disagreements and help the junior improve his or her game-playing skills faster. But we tend to rely on one test only: the junior's performance in tournaments.

04But this kind of test can produce as much confusion as clarity because the traditional tournament and ranking design lacks two essential elements for measuring a player's performance accurately:

• the assurance that opponents are competing to the best of their ability
• equtie - the only result that expresses the true difference in abilities to win between two opponents who are competing at their best.

05First, competitors often do not play to the best of their ability in traditional tournaments. Why would they go all out if they can win a match with much less than their maximum effort and skill? Why fight for a 7:0 victory if 2:0 is enough to move on to the next round or to get the 2 points awarded for winning? But if the player, coach or parent don't know whether the opponent put in his or her best effort, how can they properly evaluate their own performance and the outcome of the match?

06equTournament and equRanking eliminate this source of uncertainty because they are designed to be much more sensitive to the exact outcome of each match. They do not treat 7:0 and 2:0 as victories of equal standing. In equTournament the difference between these two scores has a significant effect on the participants' overall ranking. Consequently, the competitors have a strong interest in playing only at the very best of their ability, in each and every match.

07The second necessary condition for measuring performance accurately, is to know how to assess each result in relation to all players' previous achievements. The traditional evaluation system often fails in this respect. For instance, in a traditionally organized tournament, if you win a tennis match 7:6 7:6 against a beginner you are through to the next round; but if you lose 6:7 6:7 to the number-one player in the world, you are out of the competition. Though most tennis players would think of losing to the best player in the world by 6:7 6:7 as a much greater achievement than to win against a beginner by 7:6 7:6, the traditional evaluation system favours the latter case. It basically says that it is always better to win than to lose, no matter who the opponents are, and what the final score is.

08The above example is simplistic since all parents would naturally be thrilled at seeing their kids lose 6:7, 6:7 to the number one in the world. In reality most cases are not so obvious. Take any junior tennis tournament and try to decide: what would be a better performance, a 4:6, 4:6 loss to the third-seeded player or a 7:6, 6:3 win against the 22nd player on the entry list? It is easy to see how the coach, parents and kid might not give the same answers to this question.

09equTournament minimizes the likelihood of any such disagreement. Contrary to the traditional design, equTournament considers both the scores and the revealed "strength" of the opponents, and as a result, its ranking system is far more informative than any of the traditional systems. After each match, equTournament computes each player's ranking in such a way as to reveal which results against which opponent constitutes an achievement, an underachievement or a tie for the player concerned. Simply put, before the match the opposing players will know only what we call their equtie - the result that would not affect either player's position in the ranking. Equtie can be understood as a true or real tie. If either of the players does better than their equtie, he or she has achieved what can be called an equwin; when either of them does worse, this constitutes a failure as compared to their previous performance or an equloss.

10In other words, equTournament tells each player exactly how well she or he played in their last match, as compared to their own previous matches, while fully taking into account the strength of their opponents in both the previous matches and the present one. It gives a precise, up-to-date and fully informative answer to the all-important question: "how did I do?" And without an accurate and informative answer to that question, neither the player, nor the coach, nor the parent can even begin to answer the next question: "how can we do better?"