This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, September, 2018
Since the dawn of spheres, people have been debating about how best to put on a bowling tournament. Should the focus be on fairness to the competitors? Entertainment for the fans? Some kind of science-defying solution that is both fair and entertaining?
Yes, let’s try that last thing.
First, we need to exclude the good players so everyone else has a chance. Except no fans want to watch lesser players bowl, and we need fans to generate sponsorships, and advertisers don’t spend money on fairness. Maybe, instead, we need to exclude the lesser players, because they “play the lanes wrong” and get in the way of the good players. But, without the lesser players, whose bank accounts are the good players going to raid?
Of course, we can’t separate the two groups, because that would put a clear line between professionals and amateurs, which would ruin bowling’s storied tradition of the infinitely blurred line we all cherish so much.
Looks like we need to open the field to everyone, but make sure all players—from the greatest player who ever lived to the lowliest schlub—have an exactly equal chance to win.
That may not seem fair to the best players, but their ability—which is already unfairly higher than that of the lesser players—should balance out any issues.
To maintain integrity, we need to start with a lot of qualifying games. Let’s go with 10 eight-game blocks, totaling 80 qualifying games. If we’re truly being fair, it should be an infinite number of games, because there will always be someone a thousand pins out of the cut who is sure he could’ve made it if only given eight more games, but if we stop at 80, we’re going to almost always guarantee the best players will be at the top and still have a little bit of hand flesh remaining.
Now that we’ve separated the best players from the rest of the field, we need to make sure everyone makes the cut anyway, because it would be unfair if someone who bowled worse than someone else didn’t advance.
In order to give everyone a chance, we either need to give the players down in the field an opportunity to add pins artificially, or we need to strip the top players of the impressive pinfalls they earned during qualifying, rendering all 80 games utterly meaningless.
Unfortunately, if we make all the players drop their totals and start over in a shorter block, we’ve given a player who trailed by 35,000 pins a chance to defeat a guy who set the all-time 80-game pinfall record. Even an Epsilon-Plus can see that’s not fair. Instead, maybe we should add a match-play round and give players a reward (in the form of 30 pins, perhaps) for winning a match. This adds importance to head-to-head competition, turning the players into competitive athletes and instantly adding entertainment value. Unfortunately, this may reduce fairness as the match-play matrix might randomly determine a slightly more favorable schedule for one player over another.
At the professional level, reduced fairness is necessary, as ongoing high-dollar bowling can’t exist without the coveted added money from advertisers. At the non-professional level in which little, if any, added money is involved, we can weight the format entirely toward fairness, as it doesn’t matter if the event is contested in front of an audience of zero or six billion.
Of course, this means the best bowlers are subject to the least fairness, but have a chance at the most money, whereas the rest of the bowlers get more fairness and less money, but at least they have a nice way to spend a weekend and don’t have to wear slacks.
And that, bowling fans, is the perfect bowling format.
“But,” interrupts a reader, “your alleged perfect bowling format is incomprehensible, incomplete and hasn’t even been fully explained due to multiple tangents and contingencies.”
That’s a fair point.