GNT Flight B Seeding Problem

We have an interesting first world problem. There are a lot of teams signed up for GNT Flight B this year in District 24. In fact, it is popular enough that the every eligible member of our District GNT Committee is playing (those with fewer than 2500 Masterpoints). The more senior members of our GNT Committee are not in a good position to seed the teams. Also, Flight B is likely to use the classic “two groups” method of splitting the field, which we used in Flight A and Flight C.

Masterpoints to the Rescue?

The simplest solution is to seed based on Masterpoints, which everyone knows is not great, but at least is objective and should draw the least amount of process complaints. At least doing things this way, it is no worse than randomly seeding, and should be deterministic.

Straight Swiss?

Another simple method that should draw no procedural complaints: forget trying to use a round robin and forget seeding. The opening round at the national finals is a swiss, with all the randomness that comes with matching opponents by cumulative Victory Points with no playbacks. You might pull a swiss gambit, you might get an unlucky run of opponents, you might chance upon the right few crucial blitzes to pull ahead. The only guarantee is that it is slightly unfair for everyone — you won’t face every team in your group.

Defending Champions – Team Goodspeed

Regardless of seeding method, Team Goodspeed qualifies under our definition of defending champions from the prior year (one of the top 2 teams in the District finals with a majority of identical team members). With captain Celia Verrier, Carole Pasquarelli, and Joann Goodspeed as the three returning members (Lore Monnig is unable to attend Toronto this year), this team will receive favorable seeding, a sufficiently vague definition that hopefully everyone trusts the committee will be able to honor in law and spirit.

Fun fact, Team Jonas-Silver narrowly misses the other defending champion favorable seeding benefit. They would have qualified had it not been for two unrelated, personal and last minute calamities that required a 15-minutes-before-game-time reconfiguration in May 2023. With only two members of last year’s team returning, they will be seeded along with the rest of us.

Seeding Ourselves?

The District 25 folks, aka New England, have an interesting way to seed. The captains all seed themselves. Meaning, each captain stack ranks every other team (no ties allowed), omitting their own team, and submits it to the director in charge. The director aggregates the rankings weighing everyone’s opinion equally and comes up with a total ordering.

Everyone’s first objection is the rankings from some captains might not be accurate. In fact, you might go step one further and ponder whether there is some advantage to ranking a strong team low or a weak team high. However, if there is some obvious way to benefit from such a method, with or without collusion, it’s not obvious how to truly game it. Plus, if discovered it could be considered an interesting ethical violation.

Forming a Special Committee

Most likely we will need to invite a few key players who knows a majority of the Flight B field and ask them to be part of a seeding committee. They will then submit their groupings to the director who will have a final ruling on what is most appropriate. Ideally seeding has minimal impact, but it can create relatively large consequences for the KO phase, not just the quarterfinals but all subsequent rounds. Do we have any takers, not planning to play, that will volunteer for this glorious task?