I really really really really liked it!

I love how this system forces players in the later rounds to start really balancing there selections so they have to start going for 11's and 12's.

Granted I had some pretty trollin selections. I love how it gave me the option to throw down a hard song medium and easy right in the beginning. Especially with any difficulty.

It allowed for a lot more strategy. A lot more.
Speaking of the tournament. It went relatively smoothly.
Yes you guys were a bit stressed, but sometimes things need to be run with an iron fist. More importantly, I don't think there was one complaint or change to the rules throughout the whole thing.

Only typical drama that came up was legit pad way offs and pad misses that were game changers.

So congratz. You have my approval!

Laura, how was this ruleset different from the card tournament we did for the DDR Nationals?

Jon, it was different in pretty much every way.  Basically, instead of picking a song against your opponent, you wrote three songs down for your opponent to choose from, and they have to add up to a number of feet.  So, for example, the first round, every card was 26 points, so you could pick two nines and an eight, a seven, nine, and ten, etc etc.  No songs were pre-selected.

See Sakuracon thread for more details.

The point-card system did a good job of balancing everything, but does mean a lot of organizer overhead.  The round values could probably use a little tweaking, but it did what was intended - there were mostly 8's - 10's in the first round, but a few people put 11's / 12's on their early cards and their opponent went with it; later rounds had some very hard picks on average, but there was still a good balance with the occasion 9 coming up in later rounds.

As much as there were some troll cards (there was a 6-7-13 card in round 1 plus a handful of PA Theme picks over the severe few rounds to balance against a pair of hard songs), the later cards were definitely tailored to specific opponents.  There were quite a few cases where a player would look at the card and immediately strike out two of the options because they knew they would not win on those picks, forcing them to the third, which still wasn't ideal, but was usually not an advantageous pick for the opponent (people usually said what they were thinking about the card) - it kept us from uniformly going to tiebreakers like we usually do in open selection tournaments, but still generally kept the matches very close.

A separate concern that came up was the pad error arbitration rules; always throwing out results where the error was the difference between winning and losing is a bit awkward.  I don't like the idea of always taking a recalc at face value, but was thinking that, if the error does change the results against an excellent-fantastic recalc, then we do a conservative recalc (each error as 2 excellents, averaged from an excellent-great recalc formula); if the recalc score still wins, it's decisive enough to call it, otherwise it's too close to call and we'll go onto a redo.  In a handful of our matches, we threw out the results between of one error against a 5 or 6 excellent spread, which definitely wasn't a proper formula, but I don't like the idea that a 30 e + 1 pad miss beats 32 e, no questions asked, since greats, though rare, do happen, and getting a great instead of that miss would still have been a loss.

I love the recalc idea. 

When I get a chance, I'll run some numbers for the recalc proposal, since I might not have perfect tolerances in place and probably will need to tweak the exact details.

It is very similar to how we've handled scoring for Extreme for years (and how Konami handles it for SN and later) with 2/1/0/0/0 - we only had a couple pad errors yesterday, and they really only came up in cases where the spread was more than 2 greats, so never had to make that call.

ITG's formula is balanced a little differently and the wider timing windows make the totals look a bit different, so the DDR style formula isn't a perfect fit, but I think a little tweaking could get rid of the headaches we had on Saturday (e.g. we had to throw out 13e + 1 error vs. 18e, where the winner should have been obvious) without introducing a new (but less common) headache over how to arbitrate 32e vs. 30e + pad miss (ITG recalc formulas normally give this to player two by 1-2 points, DDR style recalcing gives it to player one by 3 points - I'd prefer to have a formula that treats results that close as a tie and moves on to the next song).

I liked it a whole lot. And I'd like to point out that no one in the tournament failed a song, even the other person's "pick", and more 7s/8s and more 12s/13s overall were played than the other ITG tournaments I've been to. So a great difficulty spread and no one really had to play anything too bad, or at the very worst the lesser of 3 evils. And as Keby so eloquently stated:
I think an interesting slight change would be to disallow repeated picks if you put them on your card in any round, regardless of whether they were picked or not, so like Keby and my final round we had to have 3 completely new songs. I also might increase the difficulty sum by 1 across all the rounds, but these are only minor symantics.

Anyway I hope to see this format again! Was tons of fun.

It's funny you should mention that, Allan.  We actually spent a fair amount of time debating whether putting a song on your card or having it selected from your card should keep you from being unable to select it in later rounds.  We ultimately decided on the way we did it largely because we wrote these rules a couple of weeks before the tournament, and we figured that most of the entrants wouldn't have sufficient time to prepare up to 50 songs to write down on their cards.  If we do this format again in the future, I'd love to announce the tournament with sufficient notice so that we can try it that way instead!

I agree that semantics-wise, the point values could have been higher.  Honestly, the cool thing about this format is that it can be adapted to any "difficulty" level of tournament by capping the point values wherever we want! 

There were some hard picks very early on, for sure, but the most important thing to note there is that the early matches with hard picks were between players who both opted to do so.  Personally, I'm in a lot better shape than I was during the great debates leading to all the discussion about caps, but still would have been absolutely screwed having a 12 forced on me in an opening round - win or lose, if I were to play a draining chart right from the start, I would not recover in time to handle my next match with anywhere near my normal level of consistency; that said, I am glad that players who wanted to play those charts got to do so without having to wait for the caps to arbitrarily disappear.


Laura and I debated the rule about repeating songs for the better part of a day and asked a couple people for input, actually.  In the end, we did the math and found that a player losing their first match before battling through the loser's bracket and into a 2 match final would have to prepare 9 cards, meaning 27 unique picks, and given that we had not tried anything resembling this format in the past, that might be a little much to force on people for a test run.  I'd definitely be interested to see how this variation changes things, and, until we thought through the risks for a first test run, it was my preference to do it this way.

As for the exact point values... that's definitely in the realm of minor tweaks, and we were trying to make a best guess as to how to handle it.

Regardless of the specifics, I think a relatively constant progression worked very well (the winner's bracket was always +2, the loser's bracket was +1 until the semifinals), so I think the more important discussion is where the first (26) and last (34) rounds should be set and then a relatively constant progression can be built onto the bracket accordingly.  Bumping everything by 1 point to 27-35 (per Allan's suggestion) seems to be fairly appropriate, and would probably help nix some of the first round overhead as people realized they that at least one hard chart had to go on their card regardless of their other picks and that they knew no hard charts.

Bumping everything by 1 point might call for tiebreakers to always be rounded down - 35 for the finals means 12 foot tiebreakers when you round to the nearest number, which, for a 1 through Rebirth tournament, means the pool of tiebreakers is like 15 songs, many of which have already been showing up on cards (or have been played), which means players will be vetoing frequently, since a lot of information about their opponent's preferences in 12's will be available to them - leaving it on 11's opens up a much larger and diverse pool of options.  Obviously, if we have alternate packs available to boost the pool of playable 12's, then there is less of a concern.