Large number of tables - Howell or Mitchell?
For a large number of tables, we tend to use Mitchells because the movement is easier. Online however, the "awkwardness" of the movement is irrelevant, and I always prefer Howells.
I have recently heard the argument that a Mitchell is superior because "this encourages the higher NGS players to attend the sessions, because they can sit in the strongest polarity, making it tougher for them to come top, yet protecting their NGS."
Even if true in motivational terms, and stronger players did sit N/S, I'm not sure the argument about protecting the NGS is valid.
Thoughts?
Comments
Hmm. I think you can argue this both ways. 'Stronger' players might be happier in the similar strength polarity but might also prefer to play a few boards against the weaker players. And will the weaker players like playing the strong ones all the time even if the results are comparitively good?
In terms of ngs, I've always felt that the best way to max out your ngs is to play consistently against weaker fields and get good at beating them. Certainly in a regular club game you can benefit from a 'fear factor' that way. I suppose if you have a bad game against a weaker field that can be quite a dramatic drop. But the ngs is, intentionally, quite volatile anyhow. It's not difficult to get ranking points back.
When playing online, the Mitchell versus Howell decision can depend on which platform you're playing on. In particular, BBO has extremely unbalanced "Howells" because they are arrow-switched incorrectly (but RealBridge gets it correct).
I would tend to prefer the movement that gives the best balance (bearing in mind that movements with large tables counts are often truncated because the number of boards you want doesn't divide well into the number of players) – the other factors in selecting a movement mostly don't matter much online.
Note that if the stronger players are all sitting the same way, they will be playing every board against weaker players – even though their opponents for comparison are the other strong players sitting in the same direction, their table opponents are the weak players sitting in the opposite direction. I think a tournament made up entirely of strong pair vs. weak pair boards is probably not as fun as one where strong players sometimes have other strong players as their table opponents.
(And in NGS terms, most of my NGS gains seem to come from average or slightly above-average results against fields that are stronger than I am. I think this is a question of style – I make quite a lot of risky calls that I hope will succeed more than half the time, but whether they succeed or fail, they diminsh the effect that the strength of the opponents has on the result on the board. Playing against weaker opposition, such calls are a worse idea because you would expect to be able to beat them even without taking risks.)