Stratification
Are there any guidelines for setting stratification levels?
Our scoring program is EBU Score and under Player Management in the Player Database you can select stratification levels by Grade or Rank for categories B, C & D.
We only stratify afternoon bridge sessions to encourage beginners and intermediate players, but don't know how the current levels were set. Is there a standard grade/rank setting for categories B, C & D?
Also presumably on a regular basis as players performance improves we would need to refresh the EBU Score database by clicking the 'Set All Player EBU Details'
Comments
There's no standard, other than for EBU events where the levels are set too high to be of use to most clubs. I think it's a good idea to consider how you want to split the field up and then try out various possibilities in your database to see what effect they have.
For our "Really Easy Afternoons" we stratify by NGS and wanted to have about half the field count as B Strat. We found by trial and error that having the two groups as "up to 6" and "7 or over" did this reasonably well. If you want more groups you would clearly implement it differently but the principle would be the same.
You are right that you would need to keep the database up to date and perhaps a good time to do this would be whenever you run a stratified game.
Thanks.
Firstly, as a rather novice score, I'd like to say I think this forum is an excellent idea and how much I think I will appreciate it and learn from it.
Once results are published and uploaded to the EBU are they 'set' or could I retrieve events and use stratification with differing categories to see how they change?
You could delete a result and replace it if the wrong stratification had been used, but for your purposes, if I understand correctly, you would do better to use an existing result and try out different criteria without uploading them until you are satisfied with the effect of what you choose. If you create a ranking list it will show the strats as long as you select the correct options in the scoring program.
We try and get an even spread of A, B and C's, though we occasionally have to tweak these as players masterpoint grades change. Also we find that all the A players tend sit N/S, presumably the fear factor of Bridgemates. We intend to change to NGS grades eventually. As Gordon says just get some existing results fro EBUscore and play about with the stratifications.
I found it quite difficult to experiment with stratifications. I couldn't get it to re-assign people on a new basis unless I did a full database update, and that often took a half hour (or longer). Is there another way? Am I missing something?
You could create a smaller database, with just the players in the current event, and then that would update very quickly.
The delay is from accessing NGS directly for each player.
If you experiment using strat by master point ranks and turn off NGS updating, and non interactive, then updates will be manageable
The forthcoming version of EBUScore (just handed over to EBU) will do the Set EBUDetails for a Club a lot lot quicker...maybe 5 minutes for a 500 member club. Robin Barker is right that if we do single NGS accesses, it takes about 1-2 secs for each, so the process can take ages....but in the new version, specifying a Club EBU numbers, this will be a lot more user friendly.
There is no world standard on the use of Strat Levels or Handicaps - As Gordon says, we have recommendations and over time, you can manage them for your particular club. The new EBUScore scheme is Strats Grade Bands -6(strongest) to +6(weakest) and the addition of these is added to percent.