Machine Politics vs Beaver Boys, May 2011. Photo by Bruce Carver
You just got picked up on the internet digg MTV Fox MS BBC pop hot rocks. Now everyone who is anyone is coming to your event.
Whatcha gonna do? Who plays and who doesn't?
City, two-city, three-city, and regional qualifiers. Give them a timeline and a format, and let them decide which teams come. All the qualifying in the weeks before the main event might help satisfy some player's competition and travel bugs, so maybe they'd feel a little less bad about getting bounced from the big event if they still got to play hard and meet some new folk.
Chicago Bike Polo 2003-2008
St Louis Bike Polo 2008-fun
lucky's right. qualifying tourneys. each major event would have a number of preceeding tournaments that are prerequisites for going to worlds. each team gets points based on where they finish in the qualifiers, but only so many positions earn points. we could do that now, just looking back at past tourney results and finding the teams with the best record. i also think that if that team wants to change players, or needs to change players, they can. if four seattle teams qualify for worlds (hypothetically, there would probably be way more) some of those players may not be able to go (work, some other bullshit). only four seattle teams go, but they could potentially look a little different at worlds.
arm wrestle-off, obviously.
{}------- lexington -------{}
Leg wrestle douche. This is, after all, POLO!
BOP: Eating Little Split Pea's shit for years.
An idea. Each tourney could post results in a sub category of tourneys on the forum, which could be used for determining who is eligible for main events.
I agree with this. Really, I think posting full results for every tournament will need to become part of the tournament organization duties. I like double elimination and I hope it stays a part of polo tournaments, but recognize that it creates a little ambiguity in results. I think that's okay.
I have no problem with everyone who goes out in a certain round of the losers bracket getting a tie for the same place, like tie scores in golf tournaments. For example, if I remember how the rounds went at words, the places would be 1, 2, 3, 4, then T-6, T-6, then T-10, T-10, T-10, T-10, then T-16, T-16, T-16, T-16, T-16, T-16, and so on, all the way to a 16-way tie for 48th for the teams that didn't make the main bracket. This wouldn't take much extra work at all, no extra games, and would be really interesting/helpful.
hello, part time lurker, full time event manager in my non-polo life.
In snowboarding, we deal with this issue almost all the time. A ranking system is super helpful when you've got registration numbers that are way larger than the total number of slots available. Results are logged (and weighted depending on the level of the event), riders have a profile each season and get seeded or selected more often depending on the event (some are Open, others are invitational).
Some food for thought here: (you can click each rider to see current and past results)
http://www.ttrworldtour.com/ranking/mens-ranking-list.html
and here: (explains how the tier system works)
http://www.ttrworldtour.com/about-ttr/ttr-ranking-information/ttr-rankin...
Obviously this is a bit more complex with polo, since it is a team sport and generating results for teams would differ at each event with potentially different individuals making up teams at different tourneys. Long range, it makes sense to have a central database with results. Polo seems to be in a good place right now since there is ideally one organization set up to "govern" the sport. I really hope polo can remain to be run by polo people, and never get into the mess that snowboarders are in where skiers control another alternate system (which is a whole other long and complex story)
As long as all of this madness resolves down to the fact that when you go to the Lone Pine or Sevy or Ole's or gas station and buy a suitcase of PBR it comes with a foil-wrapped pack that has 6 polo jerks/jerkettes wrapped inside.
Everyone's all clamoring to collect them all and shit.
I can't wait.
Of course in Canada we will have an equitable distribution of cards available to all who want it, provided they pay polo taxes. Americans will have to fight each other to the bottom. Europeans will argue about the correct language to use on the card. Australians will complain about how no cards are available where they're at and could someone "post" some to them?
>Australians will complain about how no cards are available where they're at and could someone "post" some to them?
Actually we're pretty happy that you remembered to mention us at all :)
--
bikepolo.com.au
urbanbicyclist.org
Obviously this is a bit more complex with polo, since it is a team sport and generating results for teams would differ at each event with potentially different individuals making up teams at different tourneys.
I beleive that this would be the foil in a season-long ranking system. Most tournament teams are currently made up of whoever can get that weekend off and like playing together. Keeping the same 3-4 players together for a year would be a lot of stress on some polo scenes.
Not that I have a better way to suggest.
Chicago Bike Polo 2003-2008
St Louis Bike Polo 2008-fun
Keeping the same 3-4 players together for a year would be a lot of stress on some polo scenes.
It simply comes down to the question of the month. "Bike polo. are you sure you're taking it seriously enough? nyc bike polo"
church, tabernacle, choir and what not
=Matt-Hewitt][quote]Keeping the same 3-4 players together for a year would be a lot of stress on some polo scenes.
-it seems to me that anyone on my team finds it hard to keep 3 of us together for the duration of a game.
I wreckin havin play offs for a tournie is a great idea but each area should be able to submit one wild card team that is unranked so that I can participate occasionally too...coz I luv it
MACHINE
Send in nudie flicks. Duhhhhzzzzzzzz
Maybe there could be a city/club ranking system. That's three alternatives if we ever got down to serious record keeping: track individuals (easy to do but this is a team sport), track teams (tough because teams are rarely fixed for long), or track clubs (relatively easy, but again it is a team sport).
Anyway, I was a little drunk when I posted this thread. I was mostly curious what people felt would be a fair & equitable way to throw selective tourneys. Thanks for all the suggestions.
I'd love to hear more about how I could wrap one, much less six, of the local polo jerks in foil and stuff them in case of PBR. And I'd like a jpg of someone leg wrestling a douche.
I assume you're talking about NAH regions. As far as I can tell those got set up as arbitrary dividing lines so there's some organization for the organization.
Maybe we could tweak the registration system. Instead of individuals, it would be the club reps who register. They would provide basic info (number of teams, number of loose cannons, etc...) and be the main point of contact. If the tourney is over booking, it's a negotiation between the reps and the organizer. It would put the selection back on the club and simplify communication for the organizer. And from my experience it sort of happens like that anyway.
That'll teach clubs to choose someone very organisized to be the rep.
I think this is fairly spot on. You win!
Playing qualifiers in the week(s) before a major solve both the statistical and administrative problems of keeping season long records and it only asks a team to stay together for 2-3 weekends, which will be much easier for players to schedule with their jobs/lives outside of polo. It could potentially also focus a club's moneys toward travel expenses to the major.
If there is a known group of powerhouse teams (like say MAD, MKE, CHI in the midwest) the organizer of the major tournament can preferentially assign more slots to those cities and make it more of a fight to ensure that the best talent comes out of, say, KC, Tulsa, Lawernce. To keep the example in the midwest.
Furthermore, in my opinion, regions, conferences, leagues, etc, should be kept as tight and geographically logical as possible. Equally distributing the talent is a laudable goal, but I believe it will result in A. more expensive travel, (i.e. if I have to go from St Louis to Pittsburgh to play a qualifying match) and B. A predictable outcome at season's end. If the 8 known to be best clubs are separated from each other in regional play, it means we can all guess what the top 8 seeds are going to be at the NAs.
As long as the qualifiers have the same feeling as our tournaments do now, inclusive competition, food, drink, and housing for all, I think it's the better system.
Chicago Bike Polo 2003-2008
St Louis Bike Polo 2008-fun
This seems like the logical progression.
Traveling long distances for a qualifier may be a little tricky now but I think as the sport expands you will be able to split the regions up smaller. Perhaps even by state/province. Take the top team from each province and state and you have 60 teams. That's a tournament right there.
:Edmonton/East Van Bike Polo:
As a representative of one of the 8 clubs you speak of I think that this is stupid. The best interest of the sport requires the best players and teams to compete for the championships. I would rather the north American Championships take place on a rainy sunday between East Van and Seattle with 2 spectators (knowing that they are the best this continent has to offer) than St Louis play New Orleans in the god damn superdome packed to the rim. Make a name for yourself as a player and a team and the rest will take care of itself.
i dont think caplocks is going to help get you point across. maybe its your language, or your ideas. part of the problem is that teams from your region wouldnt make it into the top eight of our region. and since we send the 4 to the top 8 of many national tournys, we want to make sure we keep on doing that. were better than you and we want everyone to know it.
Joe, Bri, This is just me talking, representing no one but myself, but all this "get better or shut up" talk is really pissing me off and making me less interested in supporting polo beyond my home court.
Chicago Bike Polo 2003-2008
St Louis Bike Polo 2008-fun
hey i was just as inflammatory and i dont get a reprimand, wtf man
Sorry, your post didn't come up in time for me to include you. But if it makes you feel any better...
Ben, you jerk, I don't need to stand on a podium to have a valid opinion about/stake in polo.
Chicago Bike Polo 2003-2008
St Louis Bike Polo 2008-fun
if you are worried about not being included if/when this scenario comes to exist, then you should probably go practice rather than trying to make it 'fair' by posting ideas on the internet. if making/not making a into a major tournament is your biggest concern, you are playing polo for the wrong reasons.
And yes, the best teams should be playing at the major tournaments. not based on regional dividing lines, but the best teams overall. assuming seattle could afford to send two or three teams to a tournament, they probably should considering they have the talent to go that deep. otherwise it will just be a wasted first round bracket for the teams that don't really deserve to be in there.
Qualifiers and ranking systems are interesting, seeing as the obscene amount of people playing polo is going to increase. The ATP tennis ranking are probably the closest thing that would work for inclusion/exclusion purposes, but they have hundreds of qualifiers and whatnot each year, so its not really practical yet.
Aside from our hypothetical plans on a Utopian bike polo future, we already elected a wonderfully bureaucratic governing body to take care of all these situations.
"Best" means the teams/people who play the most. By playing more they are also giving those afore mentioned thousands a chance to play hence bring more people into the sport. If the thousands don't play we will never realize or need the organization you mentioned. For now the teams that are at the top level are made up of people who play everyday, with team yes, but mostly with who ever is throwing-in.
And for the record I don't think NAHC should ever follow traditional professional sport's organization. The people that are serious about NAHC will know the best representation for their region and will send them. And how will the know the "best" because they will have seen and had the opportunity to play the best. I do see your points, and they are great, but we have a bunch of work to do before we get to that point. The work is to create an opportunity for the thousands to play.
I guess I missed the point of the thread, when I first read it I thought the question was referring to thousands of spectators and media attention. Which we haven't started to talk about, at lease in this thread.
HAHAHAHA! Sounds like a great job. As for the organizational aspect I really like how cyclocross is setup giving points to individuals per 1st-4th placing at events and breaking competition levels into classes A, B, & C. Teams wouldn't have to stay together as long as they played on teams formed in class per region. Players could move up a class by earning a identified point total within a season or by being called up to compete on a team in a higher class and placing 1st-4th in the event they were called up for.
There is some more for you to read. Maybe someday we will have NAHC jobs where we have to sign-on just to give our mallet hand a rest.
actually there are ways of determining who are among the best teams, they are called tournaments. they have showed that seattle was by far the best team overall this year. the second best team was east van. this goes easily without question. they finished 1,2 at the both the worlds and north americans.
This thread makes me very glad that the original 24 reps were chosen based on experience.
But the 24 reps were picked on mixed experience. That's the point. They're not all hot-shots who exude some sort of supposed superiority because they've been playing for X number of years longer than Whatevertown.
SUCK TOWN POLO
Come on man... off the top of my head I can probably name 20 companies/NGO/GO/NPO/major intra-company projects/governments/wars etc (of the thousands)...
I'm not being difficult here, but I couldn't read anymore after that sentence because I don't really know what you are talking about.
Daniel, when are we going to meet face to face and push each other over on the polo court? :D Then we can have even more fun discussions on the internet and be chummy about it.
I'm reading a lot of desire for central authority. That is, the NAH comes up with a ranking system, the NAH uses the ranking system to determine who plays, the organizer lets the NAH solve the problem of selecting people for his/her tourney.
That's a lot for the NAH to take on.
In my proposed scenario the NAH and/or the tournament organizers decide either by way of establishing a "season" towards a "championship" or by looking at the growth of any particular annual tournament that said tournament will become a limited-entry "major". Once that is decided, cities, or pairs of cities, or sets of cities, arrange preliminary tournament/s in the weekend/s before the major to determine who gets the limited slots. That is all.
The NAH need not create a ranking system. The organizer lets the available/willing teams solve the problem of selecting people for his/her tourney.
Chicago Bike Polo 2003-2008
St Louis Bike Polo 2008-fun
NAH is being created. What it is "for" is still up for consideration, probably will be for some time.
One idea that is coming up here is that there are NAH sanctioned tourneys that are organized into a NAH series, presumably with a single championship event each year. That's a direction things could head, maybe realized in 2011.
Another way to go is to put power in the hands of the local organizers. If you throw a tourney, you get the joy of working out the criteria for invitations. A ranking system could be a helpful tool in that scenario. The application concept fits with this model. That is, everyone can apply to play and the organizer is empowered to make invitations.
Until then we have the Madison solution: make it big enough for everyone to play.
I've been thinking about this since i first heard someone bitch about MKE throwing an invite last year. I don't have any answers, but here are some thoughts:
1) keeping stats for players is meaningless when the number of games and the length of those games changes at every tournament, not to mention the capacity for organizers to track stats. Even if someone comes up with the perfect software for polo stats, you still need humans who are sober enough to count goals and tinker with spreadsheets. We did a halfway decent job at the NYC in Madison last year, but there's no accountability in that, and i'm pretty sure that the stats keepers didn't really watch boring games all that closely.
2) The only tournament this year for which regional qualifyers would be relevant is the NAHBPC in Madison. Fortunately, there is room for 96 teams to play lots of official games and pickup, so this may be a non-issue. If there really is that much demand, there could be first-come-first-served for X number of teams teams, and then each of the 7 NAH regions get to pick (96-X)/7 teams based on whatever system they see fit.
3) This will probably piss Lucky off but some of this needs to be self-regulated. Newbie teams should take some of the pressure off of the major tournaments by not registering. I'm guessing that there will be over 100 tournaments in North America in 2010--plenty of opportunity to play people in other cities.
4) This year, i think tournament organizers should just come up with their own system for eligibility. Yes, it will be based on nepotism and arbitrary power, but they can be held accountable by calling them names and whining at them, it usually works (see Cog Invite 2009, Grief Masters tourney in Karlsruhe 2010).
Maybe we'll be organized enough to have something better in 2011. I'm positive there will be conversations in the NAH about this in the new year that this discussion will feed into.
Newbie teams should take some of the pressure off of the major tournaments by not registering.
This part is wishful thinking. Newbies are newbies. How is a newbie supposed to understand the pressures of the tourney organizer? Why should someone new and hot to play have restraint when it comes to throwing in their mallet?
How many newbies have you encountered who believe they are going to take the top spot in their first tourney?
The rest is spot-on, as usual. Again, a local club rep should be able to help the self-regulation.
newbies can know these things by reading this forum topic.
and while i mostly agree with this sentiment, large tournaments are eye openers to newer players concerning the amount people that play in north america and skill level of some of them. i know if i had not attended NACCC 2008 in chicago as a newbie, my self and my club would never have stepped up our game.
Truth. Edmonton learned a lot at the East Van Crown. It changed the way we played for the better. You have to start somewhere. It's not like we picked North Americans or Worlds for our first tournament. It was one of the two 'close' tournaments to us.
:Edmonton/East Van Bike Polo:
Definitely truth. Tourneys need to make room for newbie clubs/teams. Organizers will need encouragement to make this happen. I imagine everyone has seen a bit of the newbie being elbowed out in pickup. The same can happen with tourneys.
And that runs exactly counter to the growth many of us hope for.
1) I thought I was responding to a hypothetical question.
2) Although I fully support Madison's plan to "go big" for the 2010 NAs, I don't agree that it would be the only tourney next year likely to outgrow it's traditional structure. I've heard rumors about the North Sides going invite-only, the ESPI's are pressuring PGH to build a 3rd court, and the freaking Midwests had 43 teams! The first 5 of those didn't even have that many individual players. Those contests can't all become three-day, 96-team super-tourneys.
3) I'm a curmudgeon. If you bit your tongue every time you worried about possibly setting me off, you'd chew through it. Thanks for the consideration, though.
Chicago Bike Polo 2003-2008
St Louis Bike Polo 2008-fun
in deference of our German counter parts madison would like to refer to the NAHC as a uber-tournament not a super-tournament.
thanks mr cumberbun
1) i have no idea what you're talking about, but it doesn't matter.
2) you didn't read what i wrote. my point was about regional qualifiers, and that they are only relevant for tournaments that are "above" regional ones. i suppose there could be a city qualifier for a regional tournament, like NYC did for the COG invite, or London did for the EHBPC last year, both of which had allocated a certain number of spots per city.
i suppose there could be a city qualifier for a regional tournament, like NYC did for the COG invite, or London did for the EHBPC last year, both of which had allocated a certain number of spots per city.
not to say there wouldn't be more than 1 team from the same city representing a regional tourney.
True, but I think it'll eventually become harder and harder to have cities sending 5+ teams to the same tourney. Fight it out within your club to decide who goes to regional tournament X. Hopefully, we will see a large growth in the number of smaller regional tourneys, so everyone can get a chance to prove themselves, but we'll see how that pans out.
OGT-COMOPOLO
Of course I read what you wrote, I just didn't pay close enough attention to the semantics. City qualifiers for regional tourneys, regional qualifiers for national tourneys. My larger point is that I believe qualifiers to be a better idea than keeping stats, hand-picking teams, or playing out seasons.
über-tournaments are fine.
Chicago Bike Polo 2003-2008
St Louis Bike Polo 2008-fun
NCAA ratings for fucks sakes. Get all those idiots who have ever written an article about bike polo, lock them in a room, make them watch footage of every individual player a la clockwork orangesque alertness and we can all play polo. Or not...
BOP: Eating Little Split Pea's shit for years.
Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhhhh........... this whole thread is ridiculous, everyone is saying similar things differently. These things should be hashed out face to face and over many beers. STATS? are you fucking kidding me? who the fuck is going to keep them little polo ferries with magic mac books? ideas, ideas, ideas, ideas, bullshit, and ideas. and the only people on here making any sense are Lucky and Sveden.
Skid & Destroy
Axles of Evil
Definitely a lot of good ideas here, but as an organizer, I'd like to mention, at least for tourneys I help run, some of the criteria I consider in addition to skill level were the relationships I had with people in other cities. Sometimes the people who went to considerable lengths housing and organizing a tourney need to be included too, even if they aren't the best players. I'd be hard pressed to say no them when they feed and shelter a large amount of my club when we visit their city every year. And certainly geography can play a role, as well as past tournament attendance. But yeah for these major tournaments a way to limit a number of spots per city will definitely have to be established at some point, what with how many cities now play, and how good everyone is getting.
might be time to apply?
sorry if I make it sound like getting into a tourny is like getting a job. but from what I've seen and heard talking to other players is that the experienced players matching up against each other are the best game to be in and watch.
resume.
send it to the organizer and wait to hear back.
Like say Johnny mid-paypal-what would stand out because he's an EMT duder, Paul has stickers everybody wants, Ben is good on film, Joe&Kremin+ are quarters regulars. Ottawa has a few years on 80% of the field and they are past NA Champions. Or on the other side of things you could be players 1 2 & 3 from little town USA 1000 miles away and been playing just 6 months but youre on a 10,000 mile 6 month polo journey and said tourny is right where you'll be on said tourny's dates.
just a thought but what would your polo resume look like?
Doug D
Brooklyn, New York
hardcourtbikepolo.com
flickr.com/photos/daytonohio
Doug D
Brooklyn, New York
hardcourtbikepolo+gmail+com
hardcourtbikepolo.com