Man on Man (MoM) contest format
The Man on Man contest format has become very popular in thermal duration. There are very good reasons for that, including, but not limited to:
1. You cannot “sandbag”, because you are told when to launch
2. There is less of a “luck” factor, because you can score well even if there’s “bad” air when you are called to fly.
There are several ways to fly MoM, and I’ll only describe the one most commonly used in the ESL, otherwise this explanation becomes way too complicated.
The first step is to divide the flyers into groups for each round. Ideally, at the end of the day each flyer will have flown the same number of times against every other contestant. This is best done by making random groups for round one, and then systematically permutating the group assignments for subsequent rounds. Using random assignments for all rounds doesn’t work nearly as well, because the end result will not be as close to the ideal described above.
Once the groups have been assigned, you call the flyers up to the winches, group by group. You want to have everybody launch into the same air, so it’s critical that they either launch at the same time (that’s what they do in F3J), or one after another in rapid succession (as they do at the Nats). There is still a small advantage to being the last to launch, but the shorter the time between the first and the last launch, the less advantage the last launcher will have.
The timers then record the time from release to landing and the number of landing points in the usual manner.
For each round, the scores for each group are calculated as follows: The best time gets 1000 points, and other times are given proportional points. For example, if it’s a 7 minute task (420 seconds), and the best time is a is 20 seconds short (400 seconds), the flyer who had 400 seconds gets 1000 points. If another flyer is 30 seconds short (390) seconds, he gets 1000*390/400=975 points. The last step is to add the landing points to get the total score for that round. If you use graduated landings to 100 landing points, the maximum score you can get for a round is 1100 points.
So lets talk a little strategy: Suppose you are in a group of four flying a 10 minute task, and at three minutes, you are the last one in the air, high up in a boomer. Should you come down? You might think so, because you will get 1000 points plus your landing points, no matter when you come down. Its actually bad strategy, because the longer you fly, the fewer points the other members in the group will get, and you want to “hurt” them as much as possible to place well at the end of the day. But you do NOT want to blow your landing, because that is added after the times are normalized.
The total score for the contest is simply the sum of the scores for each round. The flyer with the highest score gets first place, and so on. If, by chance, two of the top placing flyers have the same score at the end of the day there is a fly-off between these pilots. The fly-off determines their final positions.
One more explanation: Since sportsmen and experts fly in separate groups, how do we determine advancement points and overall standings? Tom Kiesling came up with the solution. The final, overall score is calculated as follows: Experts are simply given their final, normalized scores, calculated as described above. For sportsmen we use the un-normalized overall scores of the top expert and the top sportsman as an adjustment factor. The un-normalized scores are calculated as the traditional TD flight and landing scores. The final sportsman scores are their normalized scores multiplied by the un-normalized score of the leading sportsman divided by the un-normalized score of the leading expert. The effect of this adjustment is that if the leading sportsman missed landings and times much more than the leading expert, the scores are adjusted downwards. If we didn’t do this, then top sportsman and the top expert might both have scores close to 1100 times the number of rounds, even though the top sportsman consistently missed his times and the top expert consistently made his times.
I promised not to talk about variations, but I have changed my mind. Read on if you understand the above. Do NOT continue if you are confused, it will just confuse you further.
Variations:
• Normalizing to 1000 AFTER the landing score has been added. The merits of this scheme relative to the one described above can be debated till the cows come home. I just like normalizing BEFORE landing.
• Seeded MoM: In this scheme groups are assigned dynamically from round to round. It biases the groups towards having “good” flyers fly in groups with “good” flyers and “bad” flyers fly in groups of “bad” flyers. The end result is less spreads in the scores. It almost works like golf handicapping.
• Sometimes contests have a number of rounds, followed by a fly-off of one or more rounds for the final positions. The way this works is that the initial rounds determine who gets to fly in fly-off. Then the fly-off is a “new” contest that determines the final standings.
• The concept of throw-out rounds allows all contestants to select one or more scores to be eliminated from the final score. All contestants must obviously throw away the same number of scores. Contestants with an IQ over 25 select the worst scores to be thrown away.
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Man on Man scoring
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Posted - 08/13/2007 : 9:55:31 PM
