IRI Rule Changes - 2012

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by BJC

I think I fundamentally disagree with you. I believe that every team's final rank should be resultant from how much they win (how good they are) because that is what we are competing to find out. Everyone is competing to see who is the best, so when the ranking system utilizes a metric which has nothing to do with winning it throws a tremendous amount of noise into the ranking system. If the ranking system is supposed to rank teams by how good they are why should hypothetical team 0000 be ranked over hypothetical team 9999 when 9999 worked harder during the build season, can more effectively play the game, and won more qualification matches?

I don't think it follows that how much they win = how good they are. We can measure wins easily, but we factor other things into our assessment of goodness.

Given that the original rules seemed to count the ability to balance the co-opertition bridge as a good thing, I have to disagree with the premise of your argument.

If you use wins as a proxy for goodness, you should expect error because you're neglecting other factors. But that error isn't noise in the conventional sense—it's a collection of unidentified explanatory variables.