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)
"It's LAUGHABLE to put even the tiniest amount of blame on the competitors who are playing to win here"
No it isn't. There is a rule in the rule book, which all competitors should know, which clearly states they must use their best effort to win each match. All of the affected players were warned about their conduct multiple times during the matches. They were explicitly reminded that they faced disqualification. The match referees pleaded with them to play properly.
So, to recap: they were clearly breaking the rules of the sport. They were warned, clearly and repeatedly, that they were breaking the rules and that if they continued to do so, they would be sanctioned. They continued to do so. In this situation, it is absolutely not 'laughable' to blame them. Nor is it the wrong decision to disqualify them. The Olympics are not your regional Magic tournament; they still aspire to demonstrate qualities of good behaviour and sportsmanship. Playing to win is not the be-all and end-all of the Olympic games. When this is made clear in the rules, I find it hard to see why people have so much difficulty understanding this.
Criticize the tournament format all you like (though it seems a mite superfluous when this has been done so many times already), but it doesn't excuse the actions of the players in wilfully breaking the rules. This case is really quite simple: players wilfully and repeatedly infringed the rules in order to gain an advantage. No-one seems to have any difficult understanding why someone who, oh, drives a car in the 100m should be disqualified - because they broke the rules to gain an advantage. Why is it so difficult to understand in this case, just because the circumstances are a little unusual?
Something to keep in mind:
Perfect is the enemy of good. If the status quo is Bad, and a Good but imperfect solution is proposed, not using the Good solution because it fails to be Perfect just leaves you with a Bad situation instead of a Good situation.
Do you want Bad, or Good? Because you're not getting Perfect, no matter how much you or I or anyone else wants it.
@Max - "Best" is not an unqualified descriptor, it's relative to something. In the case of, say, hockey, the best team in the NHL is the one that wins the Stanley Cup. The best team in another league is NOT the team that wins the Stanley Cup. You go by the rules of the particular game you're playing, which are defined by your league/tournament/whatever. And in keeping with the hockey example (since I'm not a badminton fan), there are different rules in different leagues - both on the ice and in season/playoff and tournament formats and seeding.
You cannot discern the absolute best outside of the context of a league with uniform participation and rules. Therefore, the best team in the NHL is the team that is BEST AT WINNING THE STANLEY CUP. So the team that's best in Olympic Badminton is the one that wins the gold medal, which includes navigating the rules of the Olympics, including the tournament seeding method. The idea that all games have equal importance and should be played that way simply isn't true. You can play with that approach and still get the shaft due to playing tougher competition because another team exploited the tournament rules, which, in this case, are bad. If you have such exploitable rules, you have made bad rules and should change them, but it's also a bad decision by any of the teams not to exploit them just as they would exploit altered rules on the field of play.
As a general comment, even though it begins with the tournament rules, it's worth noting that because the players and their coaches should have been aware of the possibility of disqualification, they should have done a better job of letting up in their matches without being so obvious. Some of the behaviors in these badminton matches are borderline flippant, which you have to expect to get negative attention, endangering your cause. That is, unless you're choosing a very melodramatic method of protest, in which case, you're okay with being eliminated.
mottaff: no and no. What I said about forfeiting isn't a non-starter. Instead, the *alternative* is a non-starter. If there is a penalty for forfeiting, then the result is that an case where you'd want to, instead you play a fake match. It should be a given that a fake match is the worst of all possible worlds and maximizes how much of a mockery the entire competition is. You absolutely must allow forfeits over fake matches unless you want to look completely stupid and lose all credibility for your event.
It's neither here nor there about advertising dollars, blah blah. Those forfeits are never supposed to happen anyway, because in addition to allowing forfeits, you should have a non-crazy system where winning is actually better than losing. Then people will want to win and won't forfeit unless there is some real-life reason why should, such as being seriously injured or wife in labor or whatever else. What you're saying, on the other hand, is an invitation for fake matches--the worst possible outcome.
You must also really misunderstand the idea of randomized brackets if you think there's no advantage to winning. I mean if it was truly random that would be right, but no one would ever advocate truly random. I mean obviously we are talking about winners matched with the set of losers, but you don't know exactly which loser you will be matched up with next round until AFTER your match. If you know your exact opponent only after, then while you play your match you want to win because on average you'd rather face a loser next round than a winner. If you know your exact next round opponent BEFORE your match, then there is no average anything. You see exactly who they are and it's way, way more likely that with this perfect information you think you happen to be able to beat the other team more easily next round.
Adam, that's already asked and answered. That's the most embarrassing type of rule to have in a competition. The existence of the rule itself is a sham, as it's a catch all for like "we don't know how to make rules, so if we have to make up something on the spot to stop you, we will." It's actually against the competitive spirit to put players in the position where if they expend effort and play their best that it HURTS their chance at a gold medal, then enforce some bullshit unenforcible, undefinable rule against them. That the rule exists, and then that it was actually used, shows even MORE wrongdoing on the part of the organizers, not less.
And what's more, you would seem to defend the indefensible: that those tournament rules are ok. It seems self-evident that they are not ok, and that they need no defense. These rules are entirely at fault. Good for the players who did their best to win. I still maintain they are exactly 0% at fault.
Rob said: "Do you know of anything that can be done to eliminate fake matches due to a pot splitting agreement?"
That's an excellent question, though it's kind of a separate issue from this other stuff. At the very, very least you need some rules in which winning is better than losing. (Not exactly a high bar, and somewhat pathetic to be struggling with that.) Further you'd want forfeits over fake matches. Both are bad but fake matches are worse. But if you had all that, you could STILL very well have people splitting pots. So what to do?
I think the bad news is you kind of can't do anything. Imagine if you tried though. You'd need an investigative department to look into the the matter, to determine if there had been an agreement in place and splitting of pot. You could review the match footage, but that's really not enough. Maybe look their phone records and e-mails for some period before? You can see why this is totally infeasible. When faced with this infeasible situation, I have seen two answers:
1) You can't split pots. Either a) we know this is totally unenforceable or b) we are fools and don't know it. But either way, you just can't. So if you'd want to, your optimal play is do it, but not tell anyone about it. Make sure to keep all this stuff as shady and backroom as you can. Play a fake match, in fact. Try to make it close. That's what our incentive system is saying to do.
2) We fully understand how infeasible it is for us to stop you from splitting pots. Because we cannot stop you, we won't try. In fact, you can even publicly do it. But whatever you do, for god's sake, don't play a fake match. Seriously do not ever do this. Just forfeit.
Answer 2 sucks and you don't like it. But the alternative, answer 1, is a far worse answer. Magic: the Gathering actually chooses answer 2. It adds some extra stuff to prevent harassment and to actually try to bring this to the *surface* rather than to the backroom. You can make an offer to split a pot, but it must be in the presence of a judge, and you can only offer it once, before the match starts. If you get turned down, then no dice. You can't, for example, bring it up every 2 minutes during your actual match.
They chose this not because they like the idea of splitting pots, but because there kind of isn't anything else to do. Or at least nothing I know of. I think the more corrupt sports go with answer 1, which does nothing to stop the problem, but makes it all the more shady and fake-matchful. Sorry this is such a disappointing answer.
I agree with you that the rules are kind of dumb, and could encourage a behavior where you could think that the best way to win in whatever tournament is loosing one match so, you could have an easier way to the finals.
But I also think is a matter of morality and fair play, and each one is responsible on how do you play the game. Some of us are taught to give everything always, to never give up, that playing with all our effort is respecting your rival and that if you want to be number one you have to beat everyone in whatever circumstance or time in the competition. And when you see someone, a professional athlete, playing that way, maybe you could understand him, but something just feels very very wrong. Anyway that's my opinion, and you made an excellent point that make me change a little bit my point of view. Great stuff
I don't understand your paragraph about Swiss format. Players are paired with matching records. Winners vs winners, losers vs losers. Your opponent has the same chance of victory as yourself. How do you get lame ducks there?
Do you mean top scorers in the Swiss trying to rig their seeding for the elimination rounds? Yes, that happens, but it's the exact opposite of a lame duck.
Foo Bar, as I said in the original post, it's entirely possible and not even uncommon that someone in a swiss tournament will be in a situation where they will definitely not make the cut to the top 8 single elimination part of the tournament, but their opponent will yes/no make that cut depending on if they win or loss. So you really are lame duck there in that you cannot possibly win the tournament, yet you're still playing in it. Not all lame ducks are kingmakers, but in that situation, you are the kingmaker. Some people consider it "impolite" to *not* forfeit in that case, so your opponent can make the cut. Others consider it anti-sportsmanship to forfeit there. And either way, that situation is more ripe for payoffs.
The main problem that this articles fails to address: all athletes at the Olympics take a vow to play to their utmost at all times and to uphold the standards of fair play. The Olympics are expressly dedicated to the ideals of good sportsmanship, and that winning should not come before honor. Sure, they don't always reach those high ideals, but lets not pretend they don't exist.
It's bad enough when individuals decide they'd rather win than play fair, but this goes far beyond even that. This isn't Justin Wong farting out to help out Fillipino Champ (or whoever); it is the representative of a country (for no athlete attends the Olympics just for himself) completely failing to live up to the standards set by their country and the international community. It's intolerable.
Is the IOC responsible for this situation, to some extent? Yes, but that in no way absolves the competitors. The best way to prevent tanking is to have a tournament setup that does not create incentives to tank, true, but it is also reasonable to have all competitors agree not to--and punish those who are caught.
As an alternative to switching back to a single/double elimination format, and if organizers would rather acknowledge bracket placement as part of the "strategy" of the tournament, I like the suggestion that they let winners choose their placement preferentially. It doesn't get rid of shenanigans, but it (hopefully) moves it off of the playing field.
Venger: But I did take that into account. Any serious athlete competing for a gold medal should do whatever maximizes the chances of getting that gold medal. So if you were in, say, a horrifically badly designed tournament structure where losing was how you get the gold, then you should lose. It would be kind of against the spirit of competition to do anything else. I mean what are you going to do, try super hard and expend energy you will need for future matches so that you can win and REDUCE your chance of getting the gold? (Because losing is more advantageous.) The only thing not taken into account was by the rules committee here.
I say again, the competitors did nothing wrong. Not even the smallest, tiniest thing wrong. They were put in an impossible and predictably bad situation, so the creators of that situation are at fault. The players were doing their best to get the gold, as is consistent with the competitive spirit.
I think the confusion here is the USUALLY the competitive spirit looks different. USUALLY it looks like playing hard. But in this very unusual and special example, you can't rely on what you're used to. You have to actively think about this particular situation and realize that maximizing winning here looks the opposite of usual. So you might not recognize the competitive spirit, but if you think a bit about it you'll realize that it certainly wouldn't be "actively hurting my own chances of winning the gold." No reasonable system of beliefs about competition could include such a thing: that you have some duty to try your best to hurt your own chances if you want to be called a "true competitor." Quite the contrary, actually.
I think this issue also applies to what happened at the Olympics with the Japanese women's soccer team. In their last match of the round robin, before moving to the quarterfinals, the coach specifically wanted the team to play defensively in order to finish with a draw against South Africa. Japan was already tied for the top spot in the eliminations, so they were advancing whether they won or tied. The coach has explained that he didn't do this so Japan would play a "weaker" team (many soccer fans have said the tactic actually put them up against the stronger team), but because if they had won, they would have had to make an 8-hour trip the day before their next match. Soccer is the only sport in the Olympics where matches aren't being played in one central location, but rather in quite a few places spread around the U.K. If Japan had defeated South Africa, they would have needed to move to Scotland for the next round, and the coach felt making such a long trip the day before a match would've been unfair as they would be tired and have lost a day of practice. By getting a draw, Japan was able to stay in Wales to play against Brazil. This all applies to what you explained about the poor way of a tournament bing set up, but also highlights the factor of location and how travel has the potential to put a team at a disadvantage.
(Thankfully the tactic worked and Japan easily defeated Brazil last night. Go Nadeshiko Japan!)
Very interesting example, Adam!
I don't know if it was mentioned (laziness + time constraints), but I think the big reasons why nobody uses randomized brackets is that fans prefer simple and straightforward, and also the tournament organizers operate under the assumption that pool play results actually are a strong reflection of the strength of the competitors. If that second point were actually true, then the bracket positions of the competitors award the competitors who did well in pool play, and barring major upsets, the late stages of the knockout rounds would feature better and better matchups, culminating in a final featuring the two best competitors in the tournament. For that reason alone, I can't call the format itself "stupid," because while it's flaws were badly exposed in women's badminton, it's upside works beautifully. Randomizing the knockout round bracket will inevitably lead to unbalanced brackets, i.e. brackets in which the "best" competitors end up in the same half and the final ends up being a little lopsided.
All that said, I think the "beauty" of everything going right with this type of format used in badminton and most major US sports gets overshadowed by the type of worst case scenarios that we've just witnessed. Also, I think the format especially fails when the pool play is actually a very long regular season. I'm not comfortable seeing championships awarded to teams that only won 75-90% the number of regular season games as first place finishers. But playoffs are great ways for sports to generate revenue, and as such, we're stuck with increasingly many watered down regular season games, with no greater offender than the NCAA basketball tournament, which ironically many sports pundits call the best tournament in major big money US sports.
Jeff, randomizing the brackets would not lead to what you said because no one means 100% random, ever. That would make no sense. It's a shorthand way of saying that the set of winners is randomized and the set of losers is randomized, and that winning puts you up against an unknown loser, not a particular exact loser that you know ahead of time and can decide if you are personally good against. Note that it would be much more fine to know who you will go against if losing your current match had some kind of penalty, like being put in the loser's bracket of a double elim tournament. But in single elim in this particular case, there's no penalty to lose, hence the problem.
Anyway the system doesn't seem beautiful at all. It seems obviously flawed. There are any number of ways to make a tournament without these problems, and those other ways would have whatever beauty you're seeing, but without the fiasco, so I'd think that would be preferable.
" Any serious athlete competing for a gold medal should do whatever maximizes the chances of getting that gold medal. So if you were in, say, a horrifically badly designed tournament structure where losing was how you get the gold, then you should lose."
The problem is that there was a rule against deliberately losing. So deliberately losing is NOT playing to win, because it gets you disqualified. It's true that a well-designed tournament wouldn't have any incentive to lose in the first place -- but you could argue that having a rule saying that you cannot deliberately lose is designed to remove the incentive to deliberately lose. It's not a very GOOD rule (it just incentivizes losing deliberately while APPEARING to legitimately try to win), but when it was violated as blatently as it was in this case, it works well enough.
I'm actually curious as to whether the "playing to win" philosophy extends to cheating, as long as you're likely to get away with it. There's a rule against deliberately losing -- so losing deliberately is cheating. Would you advocate losing deliberately, but putting on a good show so you can get away with it, as part of "playing to win"? Or does violating the rules cross a line in your mind, even if you'll never get caught for it?
If I may give an example, say pool play finished, and of the 8 remaining competitors, 2 were obviously better than everyone else, and the other 6 were all sorts of levels of strength but noticeably worse (this was professional men's tennis for a 5-6 year stretch or so with Federer and Nadal, BTW). Ideally, you would want to make sure that those top two competitors were on the opposite halves of the bracket, so that they wouldn't possibly meet until the finals. If you randomly pair a winner with a loser, then roughly a third of the time in this top 8 situation, the top 2 would end up in the same half of the bracket about a third of the time and would have a semifinals collision course instead of the championship.
I am operating under a few assumptions. The first is that, like in this badminton tournament, the competitors already have a general idea of who's best well before the tournament starts (which is why people would even consider tanking to begin with). As such, I'm also assuming that the consensus #1 and #2 would never be put in the same pool.
For smaller gaming/sporting communities, in which there's not a lot of info to base on who's the best, I think randomizing is fine. But if you had a situation like men's tennis, in which the same two guys were ranked #1 and #2, and when both were healthy were always meeting in the finals, then I'd say that would be a situation in which you would want to make sure that if they play up to their standards in pools, they would be set up on opposite halves of the bracket.
Hope that clarifies things a bit.
Jovian, I'm not able to hold in my head the idea that that's a valid rule in the first place. It doesn't meet the bare minimum necessary to even *be* a tournament rule. It's not enforceable or discrete. So it's like some joke thing. Even if you did accept it, look at the result. The set of people who would have played obviously stupid fake matches are not incentivized to STILL play fake matches, but to make a better show of it so it's harder to detect. That's a bad result too. There are multiple reasons to completely reject this as even a possible rule.
Almost any other rule in the entire system...yeah I would say follow it, it's a rule. But this is a very special one in it's infeasibility, unenforceabibility, undefiniability, and bad effects on incentives. We're just totally off the rails in the first place if anyone takes that rule seriously. Make a decent tournament structure and you have no need for that kind of thing.
Begin Quote Section:"
"It's LAUGHABLE to put even the tiniest amount of blame on the competitors who are playing to win here"
No it isn't. There is a rule in the rule book, which all competitors should know, which clearly states they must use their best effort to win each match. All of the affected players were warned about their conduct multiple times during the matches. They were explicitly reminded that they faced disqualification. The match referees pleaded with them to play properly.
So, to recap: they were clearly breaking the rules of the sport. They were warned, clearly and repeatedly, that they were breaking the rules and that if they continued to do so, they would be sanctioned. They continued to do so. In this situation, it is absolutely not 'laughable' to blame them. Nor is it the wrong decision to disqualify them. The Olympics are not your regional Magic tournament; they still aspire to demonstrate qualities of good behaviour and sportsmanship. Playing to win is not the be-all and end-all of the Olympic games. When this is made clear in the rules, I find it hard to see why people have so much difficulty understanding this.
Criticize the tournament format all you like (though it seems a mite superfluous when this has been done so many times already), but it doesn't excuse the actions of the players in wilfully breaking the rules. This case is really quite simple: players wilfully and repeatedly infringed the rules in order to gain an advantage. No-one seems to have any difficult understanding why someone who, oh, drives a car in the 100m should be disqualified - because they broke the rules to gain an advantage. Why is it so difficult to understand in this case, just because the circumstances are a little unusual?"
...
"
" Any serious athlete competing for a gold medal should do whatever maximizes the chances of getting that gold medal. So if you were in, say, a horrifically badly designed tournament structure where losing was how you get the gold, then you should lose."
The problem is that there was a rule against deliberately losing. So deliberately losing is NOT playing to win, because it gets you disqualified. It's true that a well-designed tournament wouldn't have any incentive to lose in the first place -- but you could argue that having a rule saying that you cannot deliberately lose is designed to remove the incentive to deliberately lose. It's not a very GOOD rule (it just incentivizes losing deliberately while APPEARING to legitimately try to win), but when it was violated as blatently as it was in this case, it works well enough.
I'm actually curious as to whether the "playing to win" philosophy extends to cheating, as long as you're likely to get away with it. There's a rule against deliberately losing -- so losing deliberately is cheating. Would you advocate losing deliberately, but putting on a good show so you can get away with it, as part of "playing to win"? Or does violating the rules cross a line in your mind, even if you'll never get caught for it? "
End Quote Section
[from different authors]
The issue with this is that it's simply not possible to follow this rule. It's also not possible to not follow this rule. A competitor's "best" is not a given level of effort or performance, but rather an arbitrary judgment made by event organizers and judges.
Perhaps, for example, the competitors were demoralized by the fact that a victory would actually harm them and were performing "their best" in the face of overwhelming psychological difficulty and doubt.
As a second alternative, consider the possibility that each team felt that a minimum level of effort would completely guarantee victory - and this certainly appeared to be the case once the game began. If teams felt that way, then "doing their best to win" would be the same as lazily tossing the shuttlecock towards the net and generally blowing off the game.
"Doing their best to win" is not the same as "winning by the largest possible margin", and if the point difference were the actual goal of that rule, then the tournament organizers should make it so that players do better in the tournament by accruing larger point margins.