I think everyone is skirting around the real underlying issue here. What is the ‘legislative intent’ (whether that’s on the part of the people writing the rules or the organizer setting the prize fund for an event) for limiting prizes to certain players? Who is intended to benefit from limiting prize distributions to a certain subset of players?
While I see some logic to Tom’s statement that the 2 non-limited players shouldn’t benefit by the existence of the limited player who outscored them, wasn’t the intent of the organizer of this event to pay $900 to the top THREE players?
And a semi-related issue: Is it even reasonable to have limits on prizes to a subset of the players in an open tournament?
but, what if it isn’t an open event but as is more likely the case, an under1800 section or something similar? that’s why one would limit the take of unrated players in the section.
That still leaves the issue of intent, Scot. Who should benefit from individual limits on prizes?
The unstated half of Tom’s thesis that players 2 and 3 should not benefit from the existence of payout-limited player 1 is that player 4 would have benefited (by placing third) had player 1 not existed, therefore player 4 should reap the benefits of player 1’s prize limitation rather than players 2 and 3 Is that the intended purpose?
Excuse me. Aren’t 2 and 3 getting an enormous benefit from the limitation on 1? They’re splitting 1st and 2nd place money ($375 each) rather than 2nd and 3rd place ($200 each). You think they should make more money because player 1 beat them than they would if they had been the first two finishers?
I’m sure this was neither an open tournament, nor the top section of a class tournament. (Dave Hater can correct me if I’m wrong.) I don’t know of anyone anywhere who limits players in the top or only section from winning 100% of a first place prize.
Mathematically this is the same as saying that Player A gets $100 of the first place, Players B and C each get half of the sum of the remaining $400 of that prize, plus the 2nd and 3rd prizes, less the $50 they cannot win because of their limit (totaling $375 each), and the remaining $50 is added to the $100 4th prize and split between the 4-1 scoring players. The difference is that under your scenario you have to explain to people why the winner of the section is given 4th place. If the limit had been specified as “cannot win higher than 4th place”, or some such, you would be on solid ground. Here you will have some explaining to do, and your simple method will end up being not so simple.
Isn’t the purpose of 32C6 to deter a sandbagger from winning a significant prize and rewarding the other place players below him? They reap the benefit of being honest and not trying to scam the system. The sandbagger’s money goes to them. If this had been an U1800 class section, the portion of the limited player’s prize would have gone to the next two players who are tied. No new prizes would have been created. The money would not have been cut up to filter down to other players in the section. Now you might bristle at that as not being “fair”, but that is how the rule appears to work in prioritizing prizes. You would have to change the rule and have more Rulebook examples to explain how it would work differently to make it “fair.”
That’s why I think intent of who benefits from any prize limitations needs to be defined up front. Is the purpose to reward (possibly much) lower finishing players because a top finisher is prize limited or is the intent of the prize limitation to alter the distribution among the players in the pool for that money?
If I, as an organizer, want to say: The top 3 players will split a total of $900, should I be allowed to do that or not?
I wonder how golf handles this, if an amateur finishes in the money at the US Open?
What happens if all 3 of the top player are prize-limited? Is that essentially equivalent to the question of what happens to the top expert money if there are no experts?
The US Open may have completely different rules. The rule on the PGA tour at the time that Scott Verplank won the Western Open allowed the organizer to just “pocket” the money (presumably including it in the charitable contribution), but if they chose not to do that they simply distribute the money as if he didn’t exist (i.e. 2nd place becomes 1st, etc.) which is what they did. Of course, that’s a lot easier when the player’s prize limit is $0.
Actually, as a thought experiment on this, suppose the limit were $0. Would you say that you would still split $900 among the top three players?
If player 1 is limited to $0, I don’t think that changes the question. (If players 1-3 are ALL limited to $0, it probably STILL doesn’t change the question.)
The question to me remains: Who is intended to benefit from the limitation? The possible answers are:
A. Other players in the prize-winning score groups
B. Players not in the prize-winning score groups
C. The organizer
It is probably possible to make a valid case for all 3 possibilities.
Yes, it’s peripheral, but it goes to Brennan’s point about protecting the field from this player.
Player A, an unrated player, goes 5-0 against the field. Player A is undefeated, so unless it was an RBO, Player A ends up with a P5 rating somewhere north of 1800 (wild guess). For this, player A gets $100. B and C get $375-$400 each instead of getting $200 each because they got beat on points by a newbie instead of by someone with an established rating. Player A could have – should have? – played a tournament with an unrated prize or a series of class tournaments, possibly collecting multiple prizes on the way to 1800.
What was that about getting protected? In truth, Player A made a bad choice, and as you say, this has nothing to do with how the prize fund gets split.
I would suggest that the organizer also made a bad choice in allowing player A into the section. If the event was an individual-team ‘under’ section at nationals, the unrated player wouldn’t have been permitted in an under section. Why should it be allowed here?
In fact, that raises a possible different way to distribute the prizes.
The approach is simple: Treat the rest of the players as if player A didn’t exist.
Player A gets his $100.
Players B and C get $375 each and Player D gets $150.
This way the $100 comes out of the organizer’s pocket, not the other players. If, when faced with this possible distribution, the organizer makes the economically rational decision to disallow player A in the section in the first place, that protects ALL the players, including those who might get knocked out of the running for a prize because they got paired against (arguably ineligible) player A in some round.
After the sixth edition came out there was a rule change by the delegates saying that you cannot get more money from a tie than you would have if the player involved in the tie had scored less than you. Giving one player $2000 ($600 more than first place) would violate that rule.
I have no problem trying to justify why two players tied for 2nd and 3rd are limited to splitting 100% of the 1st plus 2nd place money.
You can not give Players B & C $400. What you would be doing is giving those 2 players 2nd place and 3rd place plus the extra 1st place money. That can easily be viewed as giving 3 prizes [2nd, 3rd, & the majority of 1st] to 2 people. I am sure someone can quote the appropriate rule in the rulebook which states that, except for special prizes, there is a limit on how many prizes an individual can win.
If there is an unrated section available then then it might be questionable to allow an unrated into a class section. If there is no unrated section available then you either limit newbie unrateds to playing in the top section for overall prizes or you allow them to play in a class section where they won’t get destroyed and become too discouraged to ever play in another tournament.
If the former then a 300 strength unrated gets destroyed in a five-round open section playing nobody under 2050, then goes into the next tournament with a 1650/5 rating and gets destroyed in the U1800 section playing nobody under 1500, then goes into the next tournament with an 1100/10 rating and gets destroyed playing in the U1200 section playing nobody rated under 900, and finally goes into the next tournament with a 500/15 rating playing in a U1000 section and maybe actually drawing or winning a game.
If the latter then the prize limitation is there to reduce any incentive to sandbag and to promote unrated players playing in a section they can find challenging without being devastating.
If there is top expert money with no experts then 32C3 allows the organizer to keep the money.
If the players are prize limited then 32C6 says the balance needs to be reallocated to the other players.
Modifying the OP scenario to also have $100 limits on 2nd and 3rd I’d say that $300 is taken from the prizes starting at the bottom of those of at least $100, resulting in the full $500 1st place becoming fourth and the $200 remainder from 2nd becomes fifth.
Describing the same thing alternatively: $100 is taken from 1st and the remaining $400 is moved to second, which is dropped to the $500 of the original first with $150 being moved to 3rd, which is dropped to $250 to match the original 2nd with $50 being moved to 4th. Then the next limited player takes $100 from 2nd and the remaining $400 is moved to 3rd, which is dropped to the $500 of the original first with $150 being moved to 4th, which is dropped to $250 to match the original 2nd with $50 being moved to 5th. Then the next limited player takes $100 from 3rd and the remaining $400 is moved to 4th, which is dropped to the $500 of the original first with $150 being moved to 5th.
So offer a ‘based on’ unrated prize equal to 1.5 X the advance entry fee, based on 3. That way if you only get one unrated, he gets 3/4 of his entry fee back.
As I’ve explained many times, there is no such thing as a player without a rating. His pre-rating before the first tournament would be somewhere between 100/0 and 1300/0 based on his age. If he goes 0-5 in Mr. Wiewel’s scenario above, his rating would be the age-based rating /5.
In truth, Player A made a bad choice, and as you say, this has nothing to do with how the prize fund gets split.