On Monday, February 13, 2017 at 3:37:06 PM UTC-8, wrote:
For the 2017 Nephi OLC Games we will be offering a multitude of daily flying tasks/games for the pilots to choose from and enjoy. One of them that I am really excited about is single elimination bracketed glider racing. I'm wondering if anyone has ever tried this before? It seems like it would be really fun - at least in my imagination...

Here is the basic structure I'm thinking about (please comment and help plus these ideas):

1. Nephi is way over subscribed so we will have the maximum 65 gliders insurance allows. This allows us to start with up to 64 glider brackets. My guess is about half of the pilots coming will want to at least give it a try so we will likely start with 32 spots. If most of the 65 pilots want to try this kind of racing, we could do a 32 bracket FAI class (ballasted) and a separate 32 bracket sports class (non-ballasted) and have two final class winners at the end.

2. We give a daily single racing task per class for anyone who wants to fly it.

3. The pilots don't know who they are racing against that day until after they land. I think this will be part of the real fun of this type of racing. You don't have to beat everyone else up in the sky, just one other pilot for the day. You just don't know who it is.

4. Starting with 32 brackets, it will take 6 days to get down to a winner. We could also have awards for the daily fastest flight to highlight the stud/studdess of the day's task.

5. Pilots that are eliminated don't go home of course. They are at an OLC camp so there are plenty of other daily tasks and "games" to try such as Grand Prix races and they can always choose to fly their own OLC flight or personal tasks at any time.

Those are the basics. What do you think? Any suggestions to make it better? I'm thinking blind racing could a fun change to knowing who you are racing that day. Like this, don't like it, other ideas?

Thanks!
Bruno - B4


A couple of ideas.

1) Do a regular contest day for day 1. After the first day, pilots racing against each other would be determined by their prior day win/loss. Winners fly against other winners and losers against other losers. That process continues until you get a full ranking.

2) Alternatively, you could match people up based on PRL seeding (you probably want to deliberately put a bit of spread between competitors, but not totally top vs bottom). This generally ensures that people end up properly ranked at the end since good pilots have a chance to bubble to the top and less skilled pilots sink down, so the later rounds are a reasonable indicator of who is the best.

3) You can either do the above matching 1:1 so you know who you are racing against (I'd prefer that), or in groups to leave it a bit more of a mystery.. The advantage of doing it in this sort of way (no matter which specific method you choose), is that you could group competitors by just the pilot or pilots they are racing against and grid/start them that way, so you spread groups out on course and people can get up and going rather than waiting for the start to open.

4) Another alternative is to do small group races to start and then re-group the 1,2,3,4, etc finishers from each together the next day. You could do this the first day with two groups of racers to set the initial brackets instead of using seeding.

5) Pilots can always drop out any time they don't want to keep in the contest and you can adjust the matching system accordingly. You could even allow pilots to skip a day (counts as a loss and you end up with a tougher seeding)

Just some ideas. I like the idea of giving people the option to keep racing through to the end, even if they can't win it all, rather then being eliminated from the contest with a single loss.

Andy Blackburn
9B