Playing to Win in Badminton
Wednesday, August 1, 2012 at 12:15PM There's a recent controversy about players losing intentionally in Olympic badminton. A lot of people involved seem concerned that it's embarrassing for the sport. It its. It's embarrassing that some officals and spokesmen of the sport have so little understanding of Playing to Win that they think the players are at fault.
Playing Fake Matches
I have run many fighting game tournaments, and I have witnessed fake matches. I completely agree that fake matches make a mockery of the tournament. This is so important that one of the MOST IMPORTANT considerations when designing a set of tournament rules is to minimize the chances of fake matches occurring.
Forfeiting a match and playing a fake match are similar (in both cases, one side is losing on purpose), but not exactly the same. Forfeiting should be a natural right of any player in any tournament. A player should be able to forfeit for any reason or no reason, and this must be make explicitly clear in the rules. Further, it should be explicit that if a player (or team) wants to forfeit, then they should NOT play a fake match. Playing a fake match is about the worst possible thing for a competition because of the impact on spectators. If the rules make it clear that simply forfeiting is far preferable to playing a fake match and that forfeiting comes with no penalty, then the rules will have stomped out 90% to 100% of fake matches right from the start. It's just a lot more effort to play a fake match and there'd be no benefit over forfeiting.
That's not the whole solution though, not even close. That's just the failsafe you need in case there is any incentive to lose on purpose in the first place. It should be self-evident that if a tournament system ever gives players an incentive to lose, then it's a problematic tournament sytem.
Losing on Purpose
Let's look at some cases where you'd want to lose on purpose. First a few that don't have to do with the Olympic Badminton case, then the one that does. (If you only care about that, skip to the "Back to Our Story" section below.)
Let's start with two terms from game design: lame-duck and kingmaker. In a game with more than two players (or more than two teams), a "kingmaker" is someone who can, through his or her in-game actions, decide which OTHER player will win the game. The kingmaker is so far behind that he can't win, but he could deal a card (or whatever) to Alice or to Bob, which would determine the winner. This is considered really bad because you'd hope Alice or Bob would win off their own skills, not from some 3rd party's vote. "Lame-duck" (a term I use because I don't know what else to call it in game design) is the portion of a game where a certain player cannot possibly win anymore but somehow they are still stuck playing the game. Lame duck players are ripe to be kingmakers. When you don't have skin in the game anymore, so to speak, your potential to screw things up for others is pretty high. (Note that this is NOT what's going on the badminton case right now.)
Swiss. The kind of Swiss that at some point cuts to single elimination (for a more exciting finish) is full of lame ducks and kingmakers. In this format, you need a certain win/loss record to make that cut, but you can keep playing against more opponents even if you have a win/loss record that is *guaranteed* to NOT make the cut (lame duck). It's entirely possible that you will face someone who still has skin in the game: if they win they will make the cut to the top 8; if they lose, they won't. And you can decide that by forfeiting or not, with no effect on yourself, because you are definitely going to lose the tournament either way. Magic: the Gathering uses this format. You'd expect it would lead to shady situations because of all the lame duck / kingmaker stuff. And it does.
Round Robin. In this format every player (or team) plays every other player (or team). It has the very same problem as Swiss: lame ducks and kingmakers. You can be in lame duck situation yet determine the fate of your opponents. This is just ripe for their being under-the-table payoffs. Round Robin also has problems with the order that matches happen to occur in. If you have to play all your matches right at the start, you don't have the benefit of knowing the results of all the other (future) matches, so you don't know if you can get away with losing on purpose. But if your matches happen to be scheduled for later in the tournament, you do know the results of so many other matches that you can now do shady things. So all players don't even have equal access to the shady tactics, as it depends on the luck of scheduling.
Back to Our Story
And now we come to the actual problem with the Olympic badminton situation. There are "pools" of round robin play where the top 2 finishers from a pool advance to a single elimination bracket. Further, the system of seeding in the single elimination bracket is known ahead of time. This creates the situation where you could playing pool matches but *guaranteed* to make top 2 by your record. If you win, you will qualify and play team X. If you lose, you will also qualify, but you will play team Y. If you think you have an easier chance of beating team Y, you absolutely should lose on purpose. If you don't, you aren't playing to win, and you are kind of a bad competitor. You also happen to be playing in a tournament with absurdly bad rules.
I hope it's clear by now that tournament systems absolutely can have incentives to lose. And if you are holding such a high profile tournament as *the Olympics*, then I hope you'd deeply understand all this and design a system that minimizes or removes all incentives to lose, and adds in the failsafe of encouraged forfeit rather than fake matches if there was some overlooked edge case. It's LAUGHABLE to put even the tiniest amount of blame on the competitors who are playing to win here, when the tournament rules so clearly, so obviously, and so predictably have major problems. That is, you wouldn't need to even hold a tournament to detect this problem. You could just read the rules, see the clear and major flaws in them, then you'd want to direct your blame at the rules writers and correct the system.
It's doubly laughable to actually disqualify the players involved—how about disqualifying the judges? They don't seem capable of making competent decisions about tournament practices. Those who conspired to disqualify players for playing optimally inside a bad rules system are doing the sport a real disservice. Hearing about fake matches in badminton should make our opinion go down, but hearing about the sport's inability to see glaring problems in its own tournament structure should make our opinion go down an extra ten notches.
It's an embarrassing time for Olympic badminton. But not because some players lost on purpose—because someone created horrificly bad tournament rules and then tried to blame the competitors for playing to win.
Reader Comments (203)
Hmm.
First of all, the idea that forfeiture for no reason must be a part of a tournament is extremely ill thought through (or at least poorly expounded on). Sure, if I'm holding a boardgame tournament at my house, I'm not going to hold a gun to someone's head forcing them to play a game they have decided not to. On the other hand, if I'm a professional athlete and people have paid tens of thousands of cumulative pounds to watch me play, are you really suggesting that no-reason forfeiture should be not just accepted, but accepted as so important it MUST be in the tournament rules?
Secondly, I agree that the tournament structure should be different. It's dumb, and leads to dumb situations.
Thirdly, that doesn't absolve the athletes. They took an oath to play with good sportsmanship, in the Olympic spirit. That's very easily understood to mean striving to win their matches, whatever they are. If they didn't like the tournament structure (which they were away of beforehand), and not only didn't say anything, but swore an oath basically not to do things like they did, are we really going to be so quick to excuse them just because of our distaste for the crummy tournament structure?
When both players forfeit (either under your or Mober's system), then the answer is obviously the same as a drawn game (I assume the game we're tournamenting here allows for draws that aren't rematches). That means that both players have to take into account the consequences of a draw (for a particular player, it might have the same effect on the subsequent brackets as one of those unwanted wins, for instance!) and the likelihood that the other player will also try to forfeit, or not. And when you're guessing what the other guy will do, that leads into all sorts of funky Rock Paper Scissors/Yomi showdown/Mathematical game theory territory!
I think it wouldn't take much to turn these crazy dysfunctional tournament system shenanigans into some sort of viable game all by itself. Stuff the badminton and Starcraft and football, the tourney metagame is where the REAL action is!
This reminds me of the '94 Caribbean Cup, where due to the particularities of the scoring rules in the tournament, Barbados needed to win by 2 points. Up by only one, they chose to score a goal on themselves to tie, as OT goals counted for 2 points.
(There's some video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThpYsN-4p7w&feature=player_embedded)
I don't see it as a "spirit of the game clause", but a rule. It's written. They broke a rule, intentionally cheating. How, exactly, do you see this as any different than, for example, sabotaging an opponent's racket before the match?
Tris, of course forfeiting should be allowed. The alternative is absurd: forfeiting isn't allowed (or is punished beyond simply losing). Also, if Olympic Spirit means intentionally making moves in a tournament that go against maximizing your chance to win, then that's a pretty shitty Olympic spirit. Actually though, Olympic spirit is fine and neither here nor there. Sloppy rules are the issue, not spirit.
Michel, that a thing is written down says nothing about whether it's a terrible thing to write. In my book, I lay out criteria for banning things, that a ban must be discrete, enforceable and warranted. You can "write down" a "no camping rule" in an FPS game, and you'd be just as silly for it as if you didn't write down. Written or not it's ill-defined and has no place in a rules system. Just like the supposed fake, squishy, ill-defined rule these competitors broke. The problem isn't that they broke it, the problem is that's no kind of "rule" to have in the first place. Instead, have a good tournament structure that doesn't put athletes in such a ridiculous situation as this. Breaking a terrible rule like that isn't "cheating," as much as WRITING a rule like that is cheating. It's cheating in that it doesn't actually solve problem at hand, but attempts to solve it with an ill-conceived shortcut that's not up to the task.
Sabotaging opposing player's equipment is clearly illegal. That is nothing even close to what we're talking about here.
The problem with randomized/hidden bracket algorithms is that, in a major sporting event, there are millions of dollars of TV rights scheduled around knowing who will be playing where and when. Granted, keeping them secret would make eliminate some of the problems that we've seen in the World Cup for decades and in this year's Olympics, but it isn't a practical proposition in the modern era. That's even more true in a soccer/rugby/cricket tournament, where teams are planning possible locations for lodging and transport.
I'm not so sure randomized brackets couldn't work. Advertisers could pay for certain matchups if they wanted, even without knowing the exact times they the matches would occur ahead of time. With all that money, they'll find a way to make it work. By contrast, the current system absolutely does not work, as we have just seen.
Great post. I grew up loving both competitive video games and competitive sports. It's really funny seeing the different mindsets between the two communities. With competitive vgs, everyone is doing their best to play to win, to make things the most fair (like double elim tourneys), when strategies don't work players innovate new ones and are applauded for it.
It's the exact opposite of pro sports, where everything must be done as convention dictates otherwise you are wrong no matter what. This badminton fiasco is just another example of the classic "old boys club" mentality of pro sports. "Oh hey look, they aren't winning the way we think they should. They're cheating!"
People still call playing zone defense in basketball "cowardly". In American football, they still question coaches for going for it on 4th and short or for letting teams score late in games so they have the opportunity to get the ball back even though any look at the numbers will tell you this is CLEARLY the correct play. Or how about the absolute insistence of needing to run the ball a certain number of times per game when running is so obviously inferior to passing.
In Ice hockey, there are a number of "spirit of the game"-esque rules that allow referees to penalize players for literally anything they feel like should the players not play "the right way". Last year the Tampa Bay Lightning were playing the Philadelphia Flyers in a game where the Lightning did not apply any pressure to the flyers in their zone, instead just lined up at center ice playing "the trap" (an extremely effective defense that forces many turnovers). The Flyers, feeling no pressure to score and no pressure to move the puck, simply sat behind their net with the puck and stood there for 30 seconds until the ref blew the whistle and award Tampa a face off in the offensive zone (as the Flyer's weren't playing "properly"). This happened multiple times and afterwards everyone was aghast at how "cowardly" the Flyers tactics were, feeling they should have forced the puck up ice into the Lightning's trap.
Why can't professional sports adopt the video game mindset of "if a bad strategy is working, there is something wrong with the game not the player/coach"? It just comes across as so lazy on their part.
I have issues with this whole scandal due to problems with application and interpretation of the rules across sports as well. Competitors in swimming, track, and just about any other sports (all sports, really) that have a strong endurance and body wear component will regulate their level of effort and, by extension, performance in order to preserve energy for later stages of a tournament. For example, it's pretty unlikely that a runner will go 100% on his first race if he knows he has to run 4 more times in the same day and will have to be at peak condition at the end to win. Commentators even discuss this as a function of their strategies. It's common practice. It seems pretty clear that you shouldn't allow players to conserve energy in some circumstances and sports, but not others. And in all the cases being discussed, "energy" can very safely be conflated with other kinds of "effort." So, evidently there's some discrete amount of "effort" that is required to pass muster for their spirit of the game clause. But that's entirely impossible to quantify, interpret, or enforce realistically. So, why bother? I suppose someone could make the argument that the exact same behavior (intentionally performing at less than 100%) is ok if on some level you still want to win, but not if you are doing it because your desire is to lose. In that case, your job as organizer/referee is to play the Olympic Thought Police, which seems like an even more stupid and impossible task.
I personally really like the double elimination system.
I suspect a major reason it's not used is that the "Grand Finals" are typically (always?) a Winner's Bracket player vs. a Loser's Bracket player, which means that if one side wins it's over, but if the other side wins you have to play more. This is kinda awkward, and has the obvious issues with ticket sales and broadcasting.
It seems as though some of the American televised sports championships (MLB, I think NBA) manage to work through those issues, but we still might want some other solution.
One solution is to implement double elimination up to a point, then switch to single elimination. The issue with this is that you have lame duck situations (or whatever you call the opposite on the winning side). This would allow teams with zero losses to consider taking a single loss intentionally for better placement in the subsequent single elimination period.
The second issue with double elimination is that you can take one loss without losing, so if two teams from the same country face each other, there might be an incentive* to pre-determine the winner such that one of the two has zero losses and the other is eliminated, or such that both have a single loss and neither is eliminated.
(*Primarily an incentive for the coaches or others who value the country's placements above those of any particular athlete)
I doubt I'm changing anyone's mind about this, but to clarify, the Chinese team that started the string of tanking and got DQ'd didn't lose to improve THEIR chances of winning. They tanked so that they could avoid playing the Chinese B team unless they met in the gold medal round. The DQ'd Chinese team was the defending world champs. The B team got upset and was in position to end up in the same side of the bracket as the A team, so the A team tried to manipulate the bracket to create the possibility of an all-China final.
I say this as a guy who enjoys his sports: sports fans collectively can be pretty damn stupid. Introducing new and novel ideas like a randomized bracket would lead to anger, followed by ad hominem attacks at anyone who suggested it. I know, because I once suggested that instead of a rigid seeding system in the NBA playoffs, maybe the top seeds should be allowed to pick its first round opponent (heaven forbid you get rewarded for good play by picking the opponent you deem easiest for you). A forum full of sports fans then lobbed a bunch of insults at me and made a bunch of strawmen arguments, to boot. A simple, "No thanks" would've sufficed, but these are sports fans, so they go out of their way to question my intelligence, sanity, and manhood. At least they didn't throw bags of urine at me and vandalize my home.
Fans seem to prefer simple, straightforward tournament structures, with rules that could be explained in a single sentence, even if they create a lot of bad outcomes. In the defense of the popular, current models, there's something nice about being able to project the path to the championship, so it's not like they're adhering to a system with no psychic or practical benefits at all. The MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, and Division-I college football and basketball all employ the regular season, knockout tournament model, which frequently means a lot of lame duck games for all sorts of reasons, and championships awarded to teams that didn't necessarily perform the best throughout the course of the season.
My suggestion would be to run a double elimination tourney. One loss and you go to a losers bracket, 2nd loss and you are out. No incentive to lose and you get more than just one chance before you go home.
There's lots of ways to run a tournament, the Badminton federation just decided to use the one that would encourage losing for best match ups and then the players did a poor job of faking effort.
The problem with allowing teams to forfeit a match is that then that team uses zero energy and is less tired than their opponents.
I don't like that they decided to use the "Best Effort" argument, what about:
- any event that has heats before a finals (swimming, track), every elite athlete conserves energy in the heats and does not bring their best efforts
- any team sport that the coach puts in subs (think soccer, or basketball, or relay team) when they know they are going to win regardless of the outcome
The only reason why I am siding with the officials in this case is because the replays clearly show that the referrees did warn them that they could be disqualified if they did not play for real. If that was not the case, then I would side 100% with the athletes.
@ Jeff
Agree with you 100% regarding sports fans. They definitely tend to have the "whatever is the current system is the best possible system. Any other system is wrong" attitude.
However regarding your first point. Even if the China team was not gaming the system in order to set up an all China final, losing could still be considered advantageous for them if they felt the B team was the 2nd best team in the tournament (after themselves). After all, if they were in the same bracket as the B team, that means they would have to play each other before the finals. Since their goal is to win as high a medal as possible, they wouldn't want to face the 2nd best team until as late as possible, which would mean it would be best for them to be in the opposite bracket regardless of whether they cared if team B made it to the finals or not (and being in the opposite bracket gives more time for the 2nd best team to be upset before having to play them).
Of course I'm talking as a rational person, as opposed to the average sports fan who would claim that "the better team wins every time therefore the best team always wins gold and should not care who they play".
Jeff, there were four teams disqualified, only one was Chinese. That Chinese team did lose their match to dodge the other chinese team (as did their opponents), but in the circumstances, that would be the optimal move, regardless of any nationalist sentiment.
The team they dodged were the number 2 seeds, so the only way that winning that match would have been advantageous to ANYONE in that situation was if they would have been subsequently placed against the number 1 seeded team - which wasn't the case here since it was the number 1 seeds who were doing the dodging!
It just so happened that here, doing the patriotic thing, and doing the game-winning move happened to coincide for the Chinese (modulo the silly win-the-match-at-all-costs-even-when-you-should-lose-to-win-the-tournament rule that got them disqualified), so saying that it's entirely due to national solidarity is a bit daft, particularly when their South Korean opponents played the same way for the same reason.
I know 4 pairs got DQ'd, hence "the string of tanking." However, I misread the bit about the ranking of the Chinese B team, so I'll leave it at that.
visitir-
One big difference between dogging it in a qualifying heat vs. tanking a pool play match is that in a qualifying heat, you still have to qualify. If your goal is to win the championship, then the risk of a halfhearted performance in a qualifying heat is failing to advance at all. You have to try at least a little in those circumstances, whereas these badminton players were sabotaging themselves.
A quick aside before I go: tanking matches and purposefully underperforming has a long history in money sports, but usually that involved organized crime and gambling. Remember the 1919 Black Sox when 8 players (what a coincidence) got banned for throwing the World Series? Boxing has too many examples of guys who've taken a fall in the ring, and college sports has had a great handful of point-shaving scandals. I'm not sure if the negative impact of gambling on sports should enter the equation of why tanking of any kind should or shouldn't be disallowed, but I can't imagine any sport could benefit when the athletes look like Fat Tony paid them to stink up the joint.
I'm baffled by this tournament setup. I don't understand why they don't use the same system that fencers use. The top-scoring fencers during the round robin face off against the lowest scoring fencers in the elimination bracket, or earn a bye. This ensures that everyone does their best to get a good seed.
the only way to stop this is to randomly seed the matches in each round in either bracket but i'm sure that presents it's own problems
"Playing a fake match is about the worst possible thing for a competition because of the impact on spectators."
I find this comment to be odd, because you offer nothing to substantiate this argument. This article is about telling us why these systems are examples of bad rules, because they facilitate "lameducks" and "kingmakers", but you never actually tell us why those are bad things. In short, what it sounds like is, that you plan on penalising players for having the intelligence to field a strategy to augment their tactics. You're making a judgement on what makes a best player is pure skill. This is a bit like saying that the most important important attribute in boxing is arm strength, and those who use footwork are undermining the spirit of the sport. In a competition, the most important thing isn't how well you compete. The most important thing is if you win. Efficiency does matter, and where your efforts are applied matter. If you can engineer an easier route to the top, this ingenuity should be rewarded, not derided as "unsportmanly". There is nothing wrong with the sport of Badminton, nor the Olympic presentation of it. There is nothing wrong with kingmakers and lameducks, and especially not because they don't live up to your ideals of how competition should be conducted. I won't be convinced otherwise unless you can provide a substantial argument to explain why it's "about the worst possible thing for a competition" beyond the vague "impact on spectators."
How does it impact spectators? Why is that important? You tell us that Kingmakers are bad because a competition should not be determined by a vote of a third part vote. This would seem to place value on tournaments as expositions of player skill, but this opening line would play the value of the tournament on the observer, reducing the efforts of the competitors to mere gladitorial entertainment. This stance would seem to reduce the value of the sport by making it about the subject (the audiance) and not the object (the competitors). Can a competiton not occur without an audiance? Can a competition occur without competitors? I think the answers to these questions are clear. You can have a competition without people to watch it, but you can't have one without people to compete. Therefore, I must question the assertion that the worst thing that could happen for a competition is that the audiance could be impacted.
Furthermore, the idea that losing a match intentionally to gain a better position is bad is not true. Losing a match to advance your position is simply good strategy. It would be like sacrificing one's Queen in Chess to get a better vantage point on the King. Why? Because like in Chess, competitions are about capturing the "King". As I said before, one should not not penalise players because they are smart or crafty. Politics has its place anywhere humans are, and we cannot ignore this simply because we find this truth to be unplesant. We are not Ostriches. We cannot hide our heads in the sand.
I know of another possible incentive to forfeit - what if you're playing for mustard?
You clearly didn't see the match, it was a disgrace to badminton. Supposed to be worlds best players acting like children. Grow up!