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)
In the general case you're correct, but in this specific case I don't think that holds up. Losing deliberately is against the rules. They were very obviously losing deliberately, and continuted to do so despite warnings that there would be consequences if they continued. Playing to win would seem to suggest one of two things. If breaking the rules is okay, then PRETEND to play for real, but still lose deliberately. If breaking the rules isn't okay, then play at your normal level instead of losing deliberately. The teams in question did neither of those things -- so how can you say that they were playing to win?
"In the general case you're correct, but in this specific case I don't think that holds up. Losing deliberately is against the rules. They were very obviously losing deliberately, and continuted to do so despite warnings that there would be consequences if they continued. Playing to win would seem to suggest one of two things. If breaking the rules is okay, then PRETEND to play for real, but still lose deliberately. If breaking the rules isn't okay, then play at your normal level instead of losing deliberately. The teams in question did neither of those things -- so how can you say that they were playing to win?" - Jovian
Whether or not they were deliberately trying to lose is not something the judges are equipped to discern, unless they are staffed by experts in human body language, psychology, and mind-reading psychics. Given that the judges are normal sporting event organizers, it's impossible to look at any performance and say that it's "deliberately trying to lose" or not.
Even if they could do that for individual performances, however, they definitely 100% cannot put a meaningful rule on it. They might throw on some arbitrary rule to try and capture the distinction, but they definitely cannot get anywhere near accurate with any hard rule.
No definite rule means judges are going case-by-case, which introduces the subjectivity and potential nationalist favoritism that has plagued many of the Olympic's more artistic events (notably Gymnastics and Figure Skating).
Rather than deal with introducing further biases into what is essentially an objective ruleset, why not just fix the tournament rules and eliminate the problem?
Also: the fact that teams were given a warning has little bearing on the issue. If you tell a team it isn't trying hard enough, there's no way to tell if the team afterwards tries harder and still does poorly, or if they were already trying as hard as they could (say, due to psychological factors or fatigue) or if they really aren't trying very hard and refuse to try harder. Those three cases, which are basically indistinguishable to the viewer [even a expert-like viewer such as an event judge], result in different outcomes under the current ruleset.
Also #2: You might say that this case is really clear-cut and even though we don't have a good ruleset we should still disqualify these players. Even if we accept that absurdity, we should still change the rules for the future so that we don't disqualify athletes who choke, or are fatigued, or are distracted by worries, or any number of other plausible reasons a good team might perform absurdly poorly. It just doesn't make sense to disqualify athletes for not performing well enough - when those same athletes are (absent disqualification) performing well enough to progress through the tournament.
Hi Sirlin, if you believe there is nothing wrong for a player to play a fake game in order to win the gold medal, I am curious about what you think of playing a fake game in exchange for getting a bag of money? After all, getting a gold medal is considered a sign of success and bring one fame and satisfaction, but getting a large sum of money is also considered a sign of success and bring one pleasure and satisfaction. If it is not clear enough, what I am talking about is taking a bribe in exchange for deliberately losing a game. Historically, this is usually treated as corruption, and players who do this are punished if caught. But why playing a fake game is acceptable if the goal is to gain an advantage at winning the gold medal, but playing a fake game is wrong if the goal is to gain a monetary advantage? Please don't use the argument that taking bribe is wrong because there are rules against bribery. Otherwise, if the organizers of a game neglect to write down a rule against bribery, then do the players have every rights to take bribe and play fake game?
I would also argue that a rule against deliberately losing is not invalid nor unenforceable. Actually, in my view it is not about prohibition of deliberately losing, but that a universal rule about all form of sports is that players should do their best effort. Note that I use the term "do their best effort", not "try to win". Many players, especially the weaker one, know they are unlikely to win no matter how hard they try, but as sportman they know they should do their best effort if they decide to take part in a game. If the players do not do their best effort, then it is not a sport. Let's take the example of a track-and-field running race. In such a game, all players are expect to run toward the finishing line as fast as they can. If some players decide to deliberately losing the game by running backward instead of forward, do you think the public would view the game as a serious sport or as a farce? And, no, a better design of game rules would not always provide the incentive to ensure players do not want to lose. The fact is that in any game, there are some weaker players who know that their skills are too far below those of the stronger players that, so they know they cannot win no matter how hard they try. No incentive can convince them to not to deliberately lose because they know they cannot win. What prevent them from doing such deliberately losing is that the spirit of all sports requires that the players do their best in a game. If the weaker players are not allowed to deliberately lose, then to be fair the stronger players must also be disallowed from deliberately losing. For someone who stil do not believe in spirit of sports, but believe that the rules are responsible for all players behaviour, one may be argue that a solution is to make a rule to punish those players who run backward away from the finishing line in a running game. How to punish a player who run backward? A simple answer is to disallow the player from taking part in further games. This is exactly the what the disqualification in this Olympic badminton game is about.
I argee with you that as long as the incentive are still in the tournment rules, some players may still want to lose, just trying to make a better show to make it harder to detect. I would argue that this is an acceptable outcome. No one except the player himself know if he really want to win or lose. What the other players and spectators can see is the performace shown by the player. If a player who really want to lose is giving a sufficiently good performance so that no one can detect that he really want to lose, then the image of the game as a competitive one can still be kept, and no one can blame this player. While it may seem that judging whether the performance a player is poor enough to indicate attempt of deliberate losing is highly subjective and open to controversial, one must be reminded that many professional sports also involve subjective judgment. Just take another Olympic game as an example, no one can ever agrue that the scores given in a diving game are 100% objective. In high profile games such as Olympic where the referees have years of experiences in their jobs and the games, judging whether the players are giving a performance that is vastly below their norm is a task that the referees are qualified to take. There is no need to worry that this power would be abused by the referees. Sports games are played in the open for all to see, a referee cannot hide anything, so a referee know making a really bad decision would mean losting his job. However, while I consider this to be an acceptable solution, it is a suboptimal one, and the most effective solution is still to modify the tournament rules to make sure the incentives encourage the players to do the right things. However, with a defective tournament rules in place due to past mistakes, many of the band-aid measures being used do serve a useful purpose.
Ok, all of those here who are, against all logic, deriding the players...
Explain how it is that triathletes are allowed to utterly ruin their own chance of winning in order to provide wake for whoever they believe is the strongest of (max) 3 from their country: GO!
If you can not, of course, square this practice with your assertions regarding the badminton players, as I know you can not, then you will kindly understand the exact value of your contributions, and I assume cease to make them.
@Majyq - Of course the other option is that those rightfully deriding the players are completely unaware of issues with the triathlon (for which you have provided no real explanation or reference) and therefore can neither approve nor disapprove of it...
Agree the tournament system was broken and an invitation to lose on purpose, but nobody forced them to do so in that particular way. There are no bad players in the Olympic badminton tournament, they could have just played at 80, or even 90, percent of their best and gotten their loss without anyone having any reason to complain. In fact, if they had just stopped when the referee told them to, it would have been enough. But they just had to make sure nobody would think those other players were really good enough to defeat them ... Or that they have any respect for the referee. The way that Chinese pair behaved in the game could be used as a text book example of "unsportsmanlike conduct". So "losing on purpose" is not really what got them disqualified.
They absolutely should have been disqualified. There is more to it than simple tournament design. Your article makes the very broad assumption that playing someone that may be, on paper, a lighter opponent is a known advantage; it isn't. Throwing a match to get what you hope will be an easier draw is problematic in a couple ways. First, it is strictly speaking an insult to the team you would rather play. Second, the act of throwing a match can often jeopordize your own skill in your easier draw. History has many examples of teams who threw games only to lose to their easier opponents. Playing to lose has an affect on you psychologically and may inhibit your ability to play to the best of your skill in the following match. Allowing teams to forfeit would be rewarding them for not wanting to compete (and not to mention is logistically impossible in an event whose revenue is derived from people watching actual matches).
The truth of the matter is that throwing a match should and always will be a part of the sport. It is a strategy with its own risks and rewards, it is a decision you must make on your own. However, in the spirit of competition, for the good of the business model, and out of respect for all the competitors and fans, no athlete should be allowed to make a mockery of their sport by blatantly throwing a match without being subtle.
The matches in this tournament were pathetic. Olympic athletes playing at a level below that of casual participants, on an international stage. They received the appropriate punishment. Sportsmanship should be enforced in rules, for in truth it is the only way we can enforce sportsmanship. If they were really "playing to win" they should have just won all their matches. The best competitor shouldn't need an easier draw to win gold.
Also, I believe there is a history of some nations who have 2 teams in the same event throwing matches so that both teams will make it through. There is no justification for that, and if you can't be subtle while doing it, we shouldn't give you the benefit of the doubt.
Majyq, I have to say that I am not familiar with triathletes, but after reading your post I try to search the internet to find out what you are talking about. It seems that you are referring to the role of domestique. I would like to point out that what domestique does is not to deliberately losing a game. It is true that a domestique has little or no chance in winning a game, but many other weaker players who take part in a game also have little or no chance in winning a game. In this aspect, there is no difference among domestique and other weaker players. What a domestique do is to support another lead player to win. And in order to offer such support, the domestique must be giving a sufficiently good performance, since if the domestique is falling too far away from the lead player, the domestique would not be able to provide support. Since the domestique is giving a sufficiently good performance, the competitive spirit of the game is maintained, and to a spectator, what the domestique is doing is not to deliberately losing a game. If I am not mistaken, a domestique is often chosen because he is especially strong in one of the games in triathlon, although he is unlike to win the overall game because he is too weak in the other games. In the game where the domestique is strong, the presence of the domestique would actually made the game more exciting and induce other players to play harder.
Furthermore, even if domestique is appropriate for a team game where a large number of players compete at the same game, it does not mean it is suitable for a matching game like badminton where two players compete against each other. In a team game, even if a few players acted as domestique who cannot win, there are still a large number of stronger players who do compete hard against each other, allowing the game to remain a competitive sports. However, in a matching game, there are only two players in each game. If one of the player, or even both players, want to deliberately lose, then the game ceased to be a competitive sports, and instead become a child's play devoid of skills, inspiration and honor.
"In high profile games such as Olympic where the referees have years of experiences in their jobs and the games, judging whether the players are giving a performance that is vastly below their norm is a task that the referees are qualified to take. There is no need to worry that this power would be abused by the referees." -CupNoodle
No referee can tell you WHY a player is doing worse than expected. Perhaps they're fatigued, ill, or facing some psychological difficulty (such as choking in a tense moment). In that case, the player may perform very poorly despite doing their 'best'.
Your own example of players who have no hope of winning but must still compete actually supports my argument. If that athlete was expected to have a real chance, but then it's discovered that for some reason they perform poorly, you wouldn't disqualify them. Instead, you let them finish and lose their event. If the tournament rules are set up properly, that's the end of it.
There is some worry that the power to disqualify any player the referee simply does not like would be abused. Obviously, they couldn't be too egregious about it, but everyone saying that players should act like they're trying to win when they're trying to lose must realize that the same applies here; the referee can disqualify some borderline cases, if nothing else.
So losing on purpose to avoid certain opponents is grounds for disqualification, but apparently a cyclist crashing on purpose to force a restart is perfectly fine: http://velonews.competitor.com/2012/08/news/britains-hindes-admits-to-crashing-purposely-in-team-sprint_232933
Both examples of "losing" to win, but one is allowed and another isn't. Of course the worst thing they can do is then make a rule saying you can't crash on purpose. How would you know?
One of the problems I see with the randomized bracket idea is that I think it would lead to more lame duck winners. If there's no incentive to be #1 instead of #8, then once you're guaranteed 8+, your matches are meaningless. With a traditional bracket, being #1 theoretically means you will face a weaker draw of opponents, and so even if you're guaranteed 8+, you still have incentive to move up the rankings.
Andy I don't think that's right and I can't even parse what a lame duck winner is in your example. There's no such thing as "no incentive to be #1 instead of #8." The thing in question here involves a single match and a single point of randomization within the set of winners and losers. So we're talking about if you want to be #1 or #2 in your pool, there is no way to be #8 in the pool and advance. And when you *do* advance, there is also no concept of being #1 or #8. If we cut to top 8 single elim (just for example), then you are either one of the 4 winners (all on equal footing as far as we know) or one of 4 losers (all on equal footing as far as we know). So the choice under discussion was whether the 4 winners and 4 losers should be paired in a completely predictable way that allows cherry picking exactly which of two possible opponent's you'd like to play next round...or if you should not get to know which exact loser you'll play if you win, or which exact winner you'll play if you lose the final pool match.
Jon's post is mystifying to me. First he questions the strategy of losing on purpose. No need to question that, if an athlete thinks winning is a better strategy, they should win. And if they think losing is a better strategy, your disagreement on that is neither here nor there because the athlete will do what he or she thinks is strategically best.
But the worst part is that "throwing a match should and always will be a part of the sport." So you actively want fake matches to take place. The worst possible thing that a tournament can have--fake matches that make a mockery of the sport--you want them. Well, that's just a bad opinion, sorry. I think an even worse opinion than that is you want the fake matches to look real. That's really offensive to the idea of competition to me. Put on some show that isn't even about who is better, fake it real good, and that's the spirit of competition. No it isn't. If you want to win, play a real match. If you want to lose, forfeit. If you would play a fake match, don't because *that* would be the mockery. It really isn't too much to ask for us to see all real competition in a tournament. Reasonably designed rules can get rid of so many of these fake matches, so there is no need defend some system that doesn't get rid of them.
I think you're completely missing the point here Sirlin. What is the purpose of a tournament? To determine the best player? No, or at least not only this. The purpose of a tournament is to take a semi-ordered or unordered list of participants and order them with the least possible error, from first to last, in a limited time, and round robin for seeding plus a single elimination brackets does an ok job on this. It would accomplish it better if all participants made it into the single elimination rounds, but for half that make it in under this format it's still pretty good.
Double elimination without a round robin or other seeding is awful at this, it will reliably match up 1 and 2 and nothing else.
And that is why you cannot allow known thrown matches - it screws up the inputs into the weighting and makes the outcomes come out in the wrong order further down the list. So for the good of the tournament it cannot be tolerated.
Although thinking about all this I'm actually not sure what the best system is, if the goal is to take an unordered or semi-ordered list of participants and order them correctly without having each play all of the others. All of the systems are going to have exploitable flaws that you're just going to have to put rules around for the good of the game. I need to code up some simulations I think.
No Skip, I am not "missing the point." You can't allow fake matches because it's terrible for any sport. I bet you agree with that. And if you do, then you must allow forfeits. You can say, "but I don't want forfeits. They are bad for X, Y, Z reasons." Yeah they are bad for X,Y,Z reasons and everyone here agrees with that. Fake matches are *worse*. The badness of forfeits plus even more badness on top of that. Forfeits must be allowed because the alternative is worse. But they need not be COMMON. In a system where forfeiting is actually bad for your chances of winning (almost all tournament matches ever fall under this), then you won't have this forfeit problem at all. They will happen only for understandable reasons like injury or whatever.
You said seeding is better than no seeding. This is neither here nor there. It's not a defense for the bad rules of the tournament in question. It's not even a defense of disallowing forfeits. It's just some unrelated point that everyone agrees with. No one is arguing against seeding. All you have to do is create seeding in a non-terrible way. Non-terrible seeding -> no incentive to play fake matches -> allowed forfeits that are a non-factor because of how rare they'd be under this system. Done.
David: Do you think there's every any legitimate reason to allow kingmaking? Back in the day in high school debate, it was a tournament that was reseeded fairly frequently, standard highest versus low (best speaker score and best record versus worst speaker score and worst record). This had administrative problems but the advantage was that, by and large, there was no reason to lose...
Except that, once you had a certain number of qualifying matches, there WAS a reason to lose. You might want to lose when you were 3-3, and thus had no real chance of getting in, by beating other people your team might struggle with OR by pushing those people up if the team you were facing was bad and would likely be paired against your guys. There was some degree of ability to determine ultimate matchups.
I could see friends or teams using kingmaking legitimately.
Hi! I just wanted to let you know that I edited the Wikipedia page for the event; I quote you heavily and paraphrase some of your comments. I hope I've accurately conveyed the meaning and intent of your post and subsequent comments. As an economics student, and admirer of game theory in particular, the fact that the athletes are the only ones being punished and the ones chiefly being blamed is infuriating to me. I wanted to at least give them the courtesy of having Wikipedia present the logical point of view, if only for as long as the page edits last. Keep up the good work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badminton_at_the_2012_Summer_Olympics_%E2%80%93_Women%27s_doubles
Olympic Badminton on Wikipedia
Juho V: oh ok. Maybe I should try to say things more politely if they are really getting quoted in wikipedia, ha.
Arek: I don't think kingmaker is ever "ok" in a tournament. Your example seems to be the classic case of a lame duck who has the chance to kingmake.
The point of a tournament is to test the skill at whatever game or sport is at hand. We'd hope winning that tournament has as much as possible to do with how good people are at whatever the game or sport is. Kingmaking is some external force that allows a 3rd party to influence the result, so that is pretty much always bad. Not that you can entirely remove it because if a group of friends are all far along in a tournament, they could strategically choose to lose at some point (at the very least to each other) in order to maximize the chance of one of them winning. There is very little you can do about that. Collusion is really hard to stop with tournament rules that make any logical sense, unfortunately. But anyway kingmaking is still a bad thing and a thing to minimize and remove from a system as much as you can.
I was referring more to a system like the NFL where the winner teams are still seeded (and given more advantages such as home field or worse opponents) based on record. I take it from the discussion that the current olympic system just assigns "winner of pool A" vs. runner up of pool B" for the first round of the elimination tournament, regardless of how pool A's winner compares to pool C's winner or pool D's winner?
More stratification and more advantages for higher performing teams means less situations in which there is no incentive to win or no net incentive to win but in order to be meaningful, probably also requires a lot more games.
@ CupNoodle, That was a lot of words to completely ignore:
Players’ Code of Conduct, Section 4.5 “not using one’s best efforts to win a match.”
And how it squared with what is "allowed" in the triathlon. That's ok, because I knew it couldn't be.
Nice attempt at distriction, though, by way of a bunch of things that don't actually matter in the face of the only argument those deriding the badminton players have being irrelevant. Because it's obviously ok to ignore the rule sometimes according to the IOC, and once we've established it's a jelly like rule, there as only (like has been previously stated) a cop out when poor tournament structure is the real problem... then the only difference is that in one case there's still the appearance of "best effort" and in the other there is not, which leads the argument of those deriding the badminton players to encounter problems as soon as it is suggested there would be nothing wrong with what they did if only they had made the appearance of best effort... which is to say, by problems, total failure to hold up in any way,