Answers to Searching Questions from Dargaville ..

John wrote:

I think I will be getting some X-Clubs questions next Tuesday at our Committee meeting, hence I wonder if you could help me understand things a bit better

1. I understand you start appearing in the League Ladders when having placed 15 sessions, right? Would that be made up of any session? like for us both Tuesday and Wednesdays count?
2. The percentage appearing here: is that an average of all sessions played?
3. As we are playing the same boards, would a Junior player getting 50% in the Junior League ladder be as clever as (or could evenly be compared to) an Open or Intermediate player on 50% as well ....
4. I guess I am saying, would a ladder for all players participating make sense - perhaps one where we could still see the ranking, but if the ladder score is just an average of all sessions, I think it would be quite interesting to see a total ladder.
5. I still struggle with (or how to explain) how the result can change quite a bit between X-Clubs and Scorer. The top three or four pairs from last night's Scorer result have completely been swapped around - what would that tell you? Any benefit to learn from this?
6. If we used Compass for club scoring would results still be like our Scorer results, or more like X-Club?

Cheers

John

I understand you start appearing in the League Ladders when having placed 15 sessions, right? Would that be made up of any session? like for us both Tuesday and Wednesdays count?
Yes - totaled for all sessions played. However .. if you play at different clubs you'll wind up getting multiple totals as the results relate to the clubs at which you played the hands.

The percentage appearing here: is that an average of all sessions played?
Correct - average of all sessions played. Every card you play matters!!

As we are playing the same boards, would a Junior player getting 50% in the Junior League ladder be as clever as (or could evenly be compared to) an Open or Intermediate player on 50% as well ....
Yes again. But what we are seeing is a preponderance of Open players drifting to the top of the Leagues table. Of the 864 players that we have as having played more than 15 games, the first 100 places contains 8 Juniors, 28 Ints, 62 Open and 2 Unknowns. I've made up the table below to analyse these bands:

A huge factor that might influence a player's position in the Leagues is his/her choice of partner. For instance, you may see teachers playing with their learner students - that would have a tendency to suppress one's results. Alternate distortions may occur for those who ride on the coat tails of others ...

Would a ladder for all players participating make sense - perhaps one where we could still see the ranking, but if the ladder score is just an average of all sessions, I think it would be quite interesting to see a total ladder.
Attached is a text file built by a screen that I get to see before creating the XML that gets displayed on the X-Club site. I can quickly filter all result files to produce reports by club and/or by session if you want.
btw - did you realise that the column headers in those ladder-type League tables are clickable? If you want to sort on club, for instance, just click on that column header. Same for the daily ladder files.

I still struggle with (or how to explain) how the result can change quite a bit between X-Clubs and Scorer. The top three or four pairs from last night's Scorer result have completely been swapped around - what would that tell you? Any benefit to learn from this?
I can do little better than refer you to Karen Martelletti's examination of a bizarre-seeming case that came up in the very early days of X-Clubs - see attached pdf. It's from the Home page of the X-Clubs website where there is also a heap of other such explanation. To put it in a nutshell - X-Clubs is the big picture - your real place in a much bigger world. It just takes some time to escape the Illusion of Central Position ...

If we used Compass for club scoring would results still be like our Scorer results, or more like X-Club?
I assure you ... Compass and Scorer are just different tools for doing the same job. I'm sure they're both completely reliable. The data they present to X-Clubs is compared to and stacked up against results from every other club taking part. The displays you see are simply where different performances slot in.

I hope there is enough material here for you to present to your committee next week. Good luck with that.

Cheers

Mike