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)
I totally agree that it's the rules to blame. However my friend thinks different and I wanted to hear your opinions on the fact that, apparently, the rule exists (and is needed) in almost all competitive sports to stop betting scandles. I assume people getting paid to lose matches is very detrimental to the sports in question. I tried explaining than even if it's got a good purpose the rule is ambiguous, difficult to enforce and puts players in a bad situation where winning is disadvantageous but his stand is: they broke the rules so they should be punished for being cheaters. "it's blatantly immoral to fix results in your favour and against the basic spirit of competition which is to try to beat everyone in front of you rather than throw a set in order to have a more preferable run later in the competition." and apparently lots of rules are ambiguous and this can't be avoided.
He stopped replying to my posts now but I wanted to to get your opinions.
Also I found this which I want to share: "Breaking a rule is illegitimate only if the rule is legitimate. Either the rule has a rational justification and this rather than breaking a rule makes cheating wrong, or the rule is arbitrary and there is no reason to endorse it. In other words, cheating should be forbidden because it is wrong, not wrong because it is forbidden." - Why is cheating wrong? by Mathieu Bouville
Your friend is not using critical thinking skills. Point 1 is that "the rule [that you must play your hardest] is needed to stop betting scandals." Even if that were true, that is no defense of a tournament system where losing is more advantageous to winning. So even if we accepted that, it has nothing to do with the bad tournament structure.
His next point: "it's blatantly immoral to fix results in your favour and against the basic spirit of competition which is to try to beat everyone in front of you rather than throw a set in order to have a more preferable run later in the competition." This is deeply baffling. It is not "immoral" or even sensical to try really hard to make yourself lose a tournament. No rational, thinking person would do this outside of a bribe or something. He certainly does not understand the spirit of competition if he defines it as working your hardest and expending effort to hurt your own chances of winning a tournament. It's the same mistake all the other bad-rules-apologists are making. IN GENERAL it is smart to try your hardest to win matches. But if you apply this rule of thumb to an extreme, contrived special case, it is no longer true. It does not make sense to try your hardest in the weirdo case where doing so hurts your chances to win the tournament. It's foolish to do so. And it's frankly crazy to expect serious competitors to do so. Trained your whole life for this port? We expect you to hurt your own chances of winning! That's honestly quite jackassery of a thing to tell an athlete.
Actually your friend makes that same mistake twice. Here's the second time: IN GENERAL if a player is intentionally losing a match, something very shady is afoot that we don't like and that that players is to blame for. For example: that player is taking a bribe to lose. But this isn't in general. This is a specific, weirdo case where we don't have to wonder about some nefarious back-room deal. It's plain for all to see that the reason for losing here is to help one's own chances in the tournament, a thing that can't possibly be frowned upon. So the general case gives us intuition to blame the players, even when the specific case has the players acting reasonably, and just trying to win.
I agree with your last quote, Tab. The "spirit of the game" rule is always a red flag. Not discrete, not properly enforceable, not definable. I mean that's not even a real rule. Even the apologists would have nothing left to stand on if we all agreed on that point, so maybe that's the whole ball of wax here. It's pretty hard to defend a rule that ENCOURAGES playing the fakest match you can though. I mean if there's a problem with betting scandals, I don't know if you really want to send the message "make a mockery of the sport by playing a jolly good fake match." But that's what that rule does. It does a bunch of other bad things too and just shouldn't be relied upon here. Addressing betting scandals is great, so maybe a more reasonable approach can be used.
I'm really happy to get your opinion on this situation Sirlin. Since the story broke loose, I couldn't get the words out of my head as to why I felt the teams forcing a lose was bothering me so much.
As much as I want to emotionally agree with the "spirit of the rules" decision, it's just outright wrong to have such a vague rule in the first place. Rules are ment to place boundaries, as to keep focus to the game or to help cover situations that may arise where people cannot agree to the effect of a cause. The thing is to make sure that you only have enough rules to cover the basics, and any others to cover incidents that can affect gameplay; giving major advantages to teams who go outside of the scope of the game.
With my mind clear of that, I can go back thinking of non-senseical stuff again. Cheers!
Thanks Xander.
And Tad, I will revise or extend my previous thought. Let's say the task at hand was to design a rule system that stopped outside betting. First, this is probably impossible, but say we're trying to think of something. Someone suggests "how about a rule where players have to try their hardest." Then we give various objections to that idea. But then we think harder, and let's say we can't think of something better. Then we balance how lame it is to have this ill-defined rule and how important it is to stop outside betting and for argument's sake, let's say we decide to keep this rule.
Even in THIS case, we should still not disqualify the badminton players here. Here is why. In the above paragraph, we accepted a squishy-ill-defined rule. Apparently these sorts of rules are ok to us. If we have already gone so far as to have fakey rules like that, we might as well make some better fakey rules. Here's the improved squishy rule: "players who aren't trying their hardest for reasons of incentives OUTSIDE the tournament should be disqualified." The whole reason to have that rule in the first place was really to stop betting, so it's pretty bad that it would also stop players who are playing to win entirely within the tournament at hand with no outside collusion or bribes. Notice I used a squishy rule to solve the problem (how do we know exactly why a player is not trying hard enough?). But apparently squishy rules were ok anyway to us.
I think this is actually an important point. At the very, very least, at least have your squishy rules aimed at stopping the things they should be stopping. And remember you won't need these kind of rules to stop players form intentionally losing to gain advantage, because surely the rest of your tournament was designed to solve that problem.
Why wouldn't the rule just be: "Hey don't take bribes."?
Sure if we're doing rules you don't really have the power to investigate, that's a good one too.
Not sure if it was mentioned here before, but in a 4-pool situation, randomly pitting pool winners vs. runners-up in the first round of knockout, you could still get an ugly situation when it's advantageous to lose a pool game and manipulate the brackets. If there's a stunning upset in one of the pools, when a normally dominant participant loses and falls into second place in the pool, there might be motivation for a team in another pool to fall into second place to avoid a first round match with that normally dominant team.
Take, for example, the Team USA basketball team. They haven't lost an international match since 2006, and win most games pretty comfortably, including one 156-73. By comparison, the number 2 ranked team in the world, Spain, already lost twice in pools (incidentally, they might've tanked today to avoid USA), and everyone else lost at least once. Team USA isn't 100% immune to upset, as Lithuania nearly showed, but even if they crapped the bed and lost a pool match, I'm sure every other team in the competition isn't going to start thinking that Team USA is no longer far and away better than everyone else. Granted, basketball's tournament structure is slightly different than badminton's, but Team USA's status as a favorite, coupled with a general parity among the next 3 or 4 teams, works as an appropriate example here.
Keep in mind, the badminton tankapalooza started precisely because an upset of a top team occurred.
If there was a gigantic talent disparity between #1 and the field, but #1 surprisingly lost a pool match and settled for pool runner-up, I can imagine a lot of teams willing to roll the dice and settling for pool runner-up to avoid any possibility of a first-round matchup with said dominating team. I still agree that randomly pairing Pool X winner with Pool Y runner-up is a better idea than what's currently in place, though.
Your responses to Tab have been the most helpful you've made so far in bridging the gap between your view and the "blame the athletes" view, and I'd like to follow up on them. But as a brief aside, I doubt any of us are apologists for the rules-makers; I think we all agree that the tournament structure is flawed. We simply don't agree that the athletes are blameless. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Perhaps more precisely, I don't fault the rule-makers for including the "spirit of the competition" rule and I do blame the athletes for violating it. So I suppose you could call me an apologist, but I'd rather you didn't, as it suggests that I'm happy with everything else they've done, such as creating a tournament structure where losing a match provides a tournament advantage. I'm not.
But on to the crux of the matter.
Building on your squishy-rules-to-deal-with-betting post: "At the very, very least, at least have your squishy rules aimed at stopping the things they should be stopping." A good point, and if all we were concerned about were outside betting, then your improved rule would in fact be an improvement. But I think there is something else we care about, something that's worth including a squishy rule: ensuring that each match is a real competition.
I agree, a well-designed tournament shouldn't need such a rule. And I agree, allowing forfeits is preferable to having fake matches. And I agree, it's not possible to prevent such a squishy rule from becoming "do your best to look like you're not throwing the match even though you are" if the tournament is poorly designed and a contestant is in a position where losing a match will improve their chances of winning the tournament and forfeits are not allowed and the participants cannot be trusted to follow the rules.
But in this case - in the specific case at hand - that rule, squish and all, was part of the tournament. Tournament participants don't get to pick and choose which tournament rules to follow, no matter how bad the rules might be. Your entrance in the tournament is inherently an agreement to abide by them. You may disagree with them, and you may well be right to do so, but you are in the wrong to break them.
And in the specific case at hand, the badminton teams were wrong to break the tournament rules by trying to throw their matches.
"I mean that's not even a real rule. Even the apologists would have nothing left to stand on if we all agreed on that point, so maybe that's the whole ball of wax here." I think that's it indeed. From where I stand, it seems like you are saying that because it's a squishy rule - not discrete, not enforceable, not definable - it therefore isn't actually a rule and thus nobody is under any obligation to follow it. I have a very hard time accepting that logic.
That kind of rule is such a sham of a thing, I didn't even really consider it being a real rule. Imagine this rule: "We can just ignore rules of the tournament and decide, on a whim, who wins a match for no reason." Further imagine a tournament that is going along just fine, players trying to win, no corruption, no issues. Then for one match, that rule is invoked. "It's written down! Therefore it's ok!" Yeah it's written down, but the very fact it's written down is a problem. I think my imaginary rule here would be pretty universally accepted as a stupid thing.
If I were an athlete in such a tournament, I would not say "oh, you got me!" if that caused me to lose. I would say "that rule has no business in this tournament and you are being a terrible judge by attempting to enforce it right now. You're making this a worse competition than it needs to be for no good reason." So I would advocate that rule be thrown out and that the competition continue without it.
This is not some example where a rule changes mid-tournament and causes disruption to the whole event. Like if they said "oh the net will be a foot higher for your match." That changes the sport itself. This rule *itself* disrupts the event. It's some administrative rule that exists to solve some problem that isn't the problem at hand. It doesn't make sense to enforce it against those players who are just doing their best in the bad situations the rules put them in.
Yes, but that's not a rule that you as a competitor could violate. The "don't throw matches" rule is. And the players did. And they should not have.
Perhaps, as in your example here, they should have advocated that the rule be thrown out and the competition continue without it. If so, that would have been a fine thing for them to do. But breaking the rule - throwing the match - was wrong, even if they had a reasonable argument that the rule should have been scrapped.
Get the rule thrown out before breaking it, not afterwards.
Sorry, I can't take such a rule seriously. It's the an escape clause for judges who can't figure out what to do, and is not appropriate to apply in this case because there is no wrongdoing. There seriously isn't. If they had taken bribes to throw the match, that would wrongdoing, but not *because* of some rule written down. In that case, we hope that some sort of rule somewhere would penalize them. Notice the dog is wagging the tail there, not the other way around. There is an underlying wrongdoing that we hope for a rule to address. Here, there is no underlying wrongdoing apart from the rule itself. There are players doing their best to win. The supposed wrongdoing is violating the rule, not some concept that justifies that rule be there. So it's flimsy and arbitrary. It's a good demonstration that rule itself is bad because it's causing a disqualification without any underlying reason other than the self-reflexive reason that it's a rule because it's a rule.
Rules of this nature exist not just as random abstract concepts, but exist in order to prevent specific things. This is not one of the things such a rule should aim to prevent--betting and throwing the match, sure, but there is not even a claim that is what happened here. Because there is no valid underlying reason for this rule to apply here--certainly not outside betting--I think applying it shows wrongdoing on the part of the judges. They took a rule that is itself questionable and exists for reasons unrelated to this, and applied it here. And they did it because they *just didn't like* how these players were playing, even though their own tournament structure is the exact cause of the players playing that way. That's all this is. They didn't like how the players were playing, and they dug up some anti-betting kind of rule and placed blame away from themselves. The correct course of action was for the head tournament official to come forward and publicly apologize for creating rules that gave players a reason to lose, and then disqualifying the players for doing what was in their best interest. The judges actual course of action makes them look like fools and has surely caused a lot of people to lose confidence in these and other run by the same governing body.
eddie, you can't stop someone from throwing a match they don't want to win. All that squishy rule accomplishes is to force them to throw a match convincingly, rather than obviously (or forfeiting). Either you're okay with the idea of throwing a match if it's to gain an advantage for the overall tournament, or you're not okay with throwing a match, ever. Hiding behind an immoral and unjust rule because "it was there" is weak sauce.
Suppose they created a rule before the olympics, "all badminton players must use anabolic steroids." A few teams, deciding that using steroids is immoral choose not to do so, and when they are tested and found NOT to have steroids in their system, they're expelled for breaking that rule. Obviously, we can all agree that rule is immoral and unjust and nobody could be faulted for ignoring it. Many of us feel the same about the spirit of competition rule.
§ 41. Et køretøjs hastighed skal til enhver tid være afpasset efter forholdene med særligt hensyn til
andres sikkerhed. Den kørende skal herved tage vej-, vejr- og sigtforholdene, køretøjets
tilstand og belæsning samt færdselsforholdene i øvrigt i betragtning. Hastigheden må aldrig
blive større, end at føreren bevarer fuldt herredømme over køretøjet.
From danish traffic-law. Shortly put : you should never drive faster than you can control your vehicle and avoid accidents.
This is an actual law.
It is quite easily enforced : If you have an accident, you weren't driving slow enough. Break this law at you own peril. (pun intended :D)
And this is it in a nutshell. There was a (suboptimal) set of rules. They chose to break it. They were even warned! And did it again. And Again... They should be punished.
Try arguing in a court of law, that this courts law, you knowingly broke, is wrong. You'll get convicted in a flash.
Wether the rules should be changed, or their punishment was too severe : thats a totally different thing.
So please, Sirlin, IF you enter a turnament, decide beforehand if you intend to follow the rules or not. If not, please do not enter...
..And about Fake Matches : If I take the day off from work, to watch a game : I would much rather watch a game SEEMINGLY exciting, than turning on the telly and finding that there is no match. -gotta remember, if I don't know it is fake, I can still get entertainment...of course, if I afterwards find out it was arranged I get angry too...
And if it is just in my own basement, were we play for fun, and not for money : If you don't try to win, I won't play with you again...
ohhh.. and thanks for this very lively and interesting discussion! I appreciate all the effort you put into it! -what with editing and all.
I expect to follow all rules of tournaments I enter, except spirit of the game rules, which are inherently bullshit. Not unlike this very rule. It's in a very special class of bad rules. Spirit of the game has been an anti-competitive concept forever, and was used against the full court press in basketball when that strategy was first tried. Probably you have countless more example of these squishy rules where judges just don't like what players are doing, so they put in this escape clause to veto whatever thing they don't like. It's an unenlightened way of doing things.
Real rules that aren't that, yeah those should be followed. Those kind of rules define a competition, rather than go against what competition is about.
Regarding the Player Conduct rules, I find it hard to take those seriously. Is every swimmer "doing their best" in their qualification heats? Are all runners, gymnasts, and field athletes "doing their best" in the qualifying rounds? Not only do athletes consistently hold back in qualifying rounds, in many Olympic competitions -track, swimming, and weight lifting in particular- they are openly advised to do so, particularly if they are doing more heats that day, or doing finals on the same day as qualifiers. As such this is not just an issue of poor tournament design that rewards badminton teams for losing early games; it is also an issue of double standards across Olympic events. Why is it considered ok for a swimmer or gymnast that knows they are going to qualify for the final to phone it in for qualifiers, but isn't ok for a badminton team for whom qualification is not sure to take what steps they deem necessary to increase the chances of making it to the final?
"Real rules that aren't that, yeah those should be followed. Those kind of rules define a competition, rather than go against what competition is about"
But here's the nub : I think a real competition IS about doing your best to win! -that is, win the actual game, and by extension, the turnament. So - for me - winning the Turnament comes second, is an add-on, to winning games..
And this is the basis for making competitive games, that are fun to watch, which can generate viewers, thereby money and prestige for the winners..
A Turnament with lot's of walkovers (the lame ducks getty the hell out/the safe ones saving their breath) won't be fun to watch, won't have any viewers or money.
...
I think there is an underlying problem here that most people can not perceive. The rule is not there to enforce be best "spirit of the game". The judges did not punished the players for not playing in the "spirit of the game". They were punished for not providing enough entertainment for the audience. Well, as disappointing as it may be, the Olympics really are playing a huge political and economical game themselves.
Let's consider the following cases:
- If the Badminton players have acted better at faking the match, and making it look a little bit more competitive, even though they ended up loosing by their own choice, they would not be punished (who knows how many fake matches have already occurred that people never noticed.
- Any speed competition shows that players do not play "their best" before the finals. This one is easy to perceive, simply compare quarter-finals, semi-finals and the finals timings and you can pretty much prove that ALL the athletes were not doing their best efforts in the quarters and semi-finals. It's logical, they were saving energies for the finals, but If that's the case, why would this rule apply in Badminton's case, and not theirs?
- Well, in an interview, people already stated that "This is the Olympic Games. This is something that is not acceptable. The crowd paid good money to watch two matches.", where we can clearly see (as in many other interviews) the stimulation to support the punishments was because they were not correctly providing entertainment.
Last, but not least, anyone who agrees that the players are playing to win the tournament, not the matches, would agree that if they where playing to win the gold medal, using their "best efforts" and in the "spirit of the game", that is the tournament, they should be punished for trying to win the match and yielding their chances to win the tournament's final goal: the gold medal. I think that's what Sirlin actually was trying to explain this whole time. Unfortunately, these strategies do not entertain (sell tickets) as well as when players are playing to win the match, that's why these punishments do not have any to do with making a good competitive tournament, unless you consider "good" the same as "profitable".
I find the "follow the rules regardless!" commenters baffling, but interesting for a number of reasons. In discussing the issue with friends over the last week, I've noticed that the people upset at the players tend to be those who haven't played competitive games very seriously. Anyone who has immediately sees that the tournament is poorly designed and that the players did the rational thing (one of the great things about "Playing to Win" is that it's a clear explanation of an ethos that most serious competitors come to develop on their iwn).
This seemingly stands in contrast to people who are primarily spectators. The argument that "spectators got robbed" did not even occur to me until it was pointed out. The players have no responsibility to put on a good show: as others have pointed out, if the optimal winning strategy results in a boring show, do you blame the players for using it?
Consider a case where Team A is much better than Team B at a game. If Team A scores 10 points early and then just plays defensively after that, is that wrong? It results in a boring match. And, hey, there are all sorts of sportswriters who get upset when one team "runs up the score" against a weak opponent because it's not "sportsman-like."
I think what Sirlin and others are pointing out is that these things are fundamentally incompatible with "the competitive spirit" which is defined pretty well in "Playing to Win." By the way, people arguing against the competitors: have you read PTW? It does a good job of clarifying most of these things.
"I expect to follow all rules of tournaments I enter, except spirit of the game rules"
There's the wax ball, right there.
I understand and sympathize with your view that such rules have no place in tournaments. I don't entirely agree, but I do sympathize.
I do not at all sympathize with, let alone agree with, your view that such rules may be ignored by competitors who enter into tournaments which include them.
I doubt further discussion will change anyone's mind on these points.
eddie: yeah I think we're done here. Spirit of the game "rules" in a tournaments are some joke thing. I'm not even able to understand how someone could think they would be valid. They actually go against the real spirit of competition, which is to let competitors do whatever they want to within the actually-defined rules, without a squishy undefinable "that's cheap" clause for judges step in and mess with things "because they just don't like it." So we're too far apart to continue the discussion.
Stephen: Yes, well-said. And it's unfortunate that "spirit of competition" rules are stealing the name to apply to the opposite concept. More like "spirit of scrubs," or something. It's like taking away constitutional personal freedoms but calling it the "Patriot Act," as if that makes it patriotic. And yeah, there is definitely a sense of entitlement from spectators going on. Entitlement to entertainment, (very good point there Bruno) when the competitors are doing what they can to win. As usual, if competitors are doing really boring and non-entertaining things, the correct thing to blame is the tournament rules or the rules of the sport itself. Easier to knee-jerk blame the players though.