In this video, the host speaks of entering a chess tournament, and describes the players on his team assigned to 1st Board, etc. I see the sense this makes in terms of seeding – your 1st guy plays theirs, your 2nd plays their 2nd, etc. – but is that the beginning and the end of it? If their 5th board beats your 1st board, do they get more points or something?
For team tournaments the Boards are very important. For the Chess High School Nationals we had 4 person teams. The 1 faced the 1 and the 2 the 2, etc.
Generally to set the boards you needed to show some justification. As I recall, either ratings or some documentation that the order you were using was your normal order and not just for the nationals.
Now thanks to a quirk in ratings, I the 3 board (& a senior) was rated higher than our 2 board. We decided I was good enough to hold off the average 2 board (basically hoping for a .500 average in wins) and our 2 board should win the large majority by playing 3s. Our 4 was strong and our 1 above average.
This strategy won us the nationals.
I finished above .500 as a bonus. I played a rapid fire, quick exchange style that threw many off at this level of play. It was my strong suite anyway. So I end up something like 3 wins 3 draws and only 1 loss. This still ended up leaving me the weak link of the 4. We did very well.
No, each game is worth one point. Your fifth board, by definition, would never play the other guy’s first board, only their fifth board. However, “board” assignments can change with each tournament, so possibly your first board could be playing the guy who was fifth board last week. But that would have no effect on the points awarded per game.
I played fifth board freshman year of high school and we won the championship. Then all the good players graduated and I was first board sophomore year. It was a valuable lesson in humility.
They’d need to do this, because otherwise, you could game the heck out of the seedings. If we assume that two teams are identical in skill levels (i.e., the best player on team 1 was an exact match for the best player on team 2, and the second-best on team 1 is an exact match for the second-best player on team 2, and so on), and you assumed the other team were honest in their boarding, you could be favored in 4 out of the 5 games by putting your worst player on board 1, your best on board 2, and so on. Your worst player would be almost assured of losing, of course, but all of your other players would end up against weaker opponents.
Exactly, we did this to a much lesser degree with me. The 2 board had been the 4 board the year prior. He leapfrogged me in skill and I stayed at 3. Weirdly I made the team Freshman year as the 4 and barely moved. I was 4,4,3,3 over my 4 years. My freshman year, our 1 board in my senior year was our 5. So players leapfrogging me was fairly common. I never had the dedication to the game to actually get good.
But I had accumulated a solid rating in the low 1600s and the 2 board my senior year was still only up to a low 1500 despite being a better and much more dedicated player than I.
ETA: Technically we won the Novice Team Championship. There was a much smaller Round Robin with the teams that had more than one player with an 1800+ rating. Almost everyone there was at our level as I recall. Call it 90 teams in novice and 8-10 on the higher level. We were state champions that same year. That only had one level.
In the Nationals we ended up 6½ and ½ in our team results.
I have read even triple-A pitchers who graduate to the Bigs complain “Those batters are scary,” and batters saying the same about the pitchers they suddenly face. Sounds like the same thing.
Team tennis has a similar phenomenon, where you have six players on a team contesting four matches (two singles, two doubles). Each conference will have its own rules on how to order players when determining match-ups. There is definitely some gamesmanship by the coaches to maximize outcomes. At lower levels, this isn’t always about more wins, but player development as well. Sometimes it’s better to risk a loss if it gives your less competitive player a chance to gain experience.
My high school tennis team gamed the seeds hard. Our best players were about at the level of the second or third best players on most teams, so they’d usually put one of the scrubs up at #1. Said scrub got his ass handed to him and the rest had a shot.
I recall this because I was usually the scrub in question.
Back when I was in high school (my 50th reunion was last year) relatively few HS players in my area had Elo-style ratings, and competition wasn’t very organized. The school I was at for my last two years of high school hadn’t even had a chess club the year before I transferred in.
So when we played a match against my former school, I knew their players, but they didn’t know ours. To get good matchups, I moved our 5th board up to the 2nd slot, and moved everyone else down a board, so it was our regular 2-3-4 boards against their 3-4-5 boards, and we won 3.5-1.5, winning those bottom three boards.
It was fun to beat my old school, but I’m all for an environment where it’s tougher to pull tricks like that.