WL Fair play awards?

Hi, 

Does the World League give out fair play awards? The team with the fewest doubles, closed accounts and Time outs would win. 

Using the excellent work done already, it'd be pretty easy to award one. Currently, Team England would get it in Division A based on the following:

http://chessleagues.com/2015/wl/a/

It'd be kinda cool to recognise fair play in this league, especially since all the data is already being collected and stored!

Well, I may be biased, but I think it's a great idea too!

Good idea!

Fair play is great, far greater than such a simple sum, and far more widespread in the league to single out one team with an award.

The sum does not seem to work generally. It mostly just picks one of the smallest teams, and not surprisingly, its "best" score is found in the last division.

It also will seem unconvincing to many to simply use all the published statistics numbers regardless of how much they are related to the concept of "fair play".

Incidentally, all three teams of the people who have posted here so far, Team USA, Team England and Team India have caught my eye at some point in the last years for showing strong signs of particularly nice and good and fair overall activity, involving much wider aspects that mere auto generated statistics

Of course, as for all teams, this is not only something to feel good about, but also to revive, keep up and live up to

Maybe have the sum, divided by the number of boards in total for their matches, turn it into a percentage and there you have it?

Or do it by division, because a team with 15 players is far less likely to have double players than a team with 1,500 players.

Of course percentages and doing it by divisions is the first next mathematical approximation, if one really thinks that such a concept should be reduced to mere computer mathematics and to singling out teams by awards.

As explained above, there are certainly aspects about fairness not included at all in this sum, and there are aspects in this sum that are not at all as related to fair play.

Maybe a combination of both, admins in each division are asked to give ratings out of 10 for fair play for each team they played (anonymously, of course) and rank them from 1st to however many teams there are, do the same for the mathmatical statistics, add up the positions and the lowest wins?

Do remember, the divisions are designed to group teams of similar size against each other. As long as each division gets a Fair Play Award, the raw scores should be close.

Figuring per cents runs into several possible objections including, do we count the membership at the beginning of the season or the end of the season, or some other time?

To me, keeping it simple and awarding the trophy to the team with the best raw score in each division makes the most sense.

Why is it your intention to find ways to single out teams by awards for this?

Do you prefer to have one team to be declared the "best" at being "fair", or do you prefer that fairness is widespread and normal among all teams?

Why do you try to reduce "fairness" to mere simplified computer formulas?

Do you want people to strive for real complete normal fairness, or do you want to create computerized incentives driving people into trying to perform well on some simplified artificial score?

Ilmago, I'm sure you're familiar with the fair play award in the Champions League of football. That is a simple formula too. They simply count up yellow cards, and double the red cards. Is it perfect? No. But it's easy to understand and rewards teams that don't receive as many cards. And yeah, there are cultural differences between the national football associations regarding how yellows and reds are awarded. 

 The incentive of a fair play award in the world league is to create an award recognizing teams that limit forfeits, closed accounts and so on. 

Note that yellow and red cards are not at all the points shown in the statistics mentioned in this thread. Closed accounts and disqualified multiplayers are adjusted for automatically.

Losses by timeout do not require any results adjustment whatsoever, they are just statistics shown because they are easy to calculate and some people seem interested in them.

In football, when a player unfairly prevents scoring of a goal, there is a yellow or red card (and free kick or penalty kick). In the chess league, we simply can count occurrences of closed or multiplayer accounts as points (goals) scored.

If you want to create an award for the team with the smallest number of losses on time, then give it that name, and do not mix it up with "unfairness" or so. The winner of this award would most probably be Team France in Division A of WL2015.

If you want to create an award for the team with the smallest number of closed accounts, it would currently be going to Team Ukraine in that division.

If you feel there is a team that should receive a fairness award, why not simply suggest it without needing any statistics formula that only in a certain sum combination happens to put that one team on top? It certainly will be easy to spot such a team when there is good reason for an award, without needing  complicated procedures, and without devaluing it by basing it on some automatic unweighted incomplete statistics.

@ilmago: Perhaps this would not even be an award per se, but merely an informal recognition of which team(s) minimized infractions.

The teams reaching the minimum points in each statistics category can be seen directly from the statistics given, can't they?

That directly shows to anyone looking which team minimized which category most, especially for those interested in only the absolute numbers.

And of course keep in mind that not everything displayed is an infraction.

Losing on time has nothing to do whatsoever with yellow and red cards.

Well, if it's informal, then we have that already. We all notice when our opponents have few or many players banned, for instance.

Also highly valued (by most, at least) is civilized off-board conduct between teams; between admins arranging matches, and between players in matches (manifested in the comments sections on matches, and in reports of cordial vs rude conduct in the chat field alongside games, for instance), which would be rather more difficult to quantify - but again, we all have an idea of which team line-ups tend to be friendly even in the heat of serious competition (shout-out to many England vs Germany matches there, for example), and which ones sometimes fall short.

I'm not sure I'm truly enamoured with the Eurovision model ;)

More like Strictly?!

Well there are arguments for a more numerical system (easier to calculate and to understand), and arguments for a more nomination based system (that a fair play award shouldn't be all down to statistical values).

In Sport, the UEFA Fair Play League does it by a numerical system (number of cards), and the Indian Premier League in cricket does it by the umpires scoring the teams out of 10, and the average across the tournament calculated; both being good examples. A combination may be a good format, with the scoring given by teams probably making a larger part of it than the numbers of timeouts, doubles and closures.

It's a shame that the Fair Play award died because people couldn't agree on even a simple method of calculating the award. 

Is anyone in admin interested in this idea?

Do you think people will only be striving for fair play because there would be an award for it?

Do you think "fair play" should be calculated using some dry automated mathematics?

Do you really think that fair play is being done by only some teams much "better" than by others, to the point that there should be a reward about it singling out a team, or is fair play simply something that the vast majority of teams is doing, making this a nice big league?

Do you really think that "being fair" is something that one would want to wish to be declared "best at", against all the other teams? Or is being fair much more something that many teams will want to keep doing together?

Do considerations such as there make it a bit clearer why there definitely will be people thinking differently about these things than you might have been thinking about them?

Ilmago, 

Do you see the football FairPlay awards as a nefarious "anonymous" award? 

If the criteria are made clear, it doesn't matter whether the award is "anonymous" or not. Anyone can calculate it. 

Yes, I do see that some teams manage their players better than others, and yes, I do think the WL would benefit by acknowledging the teams that succeed in having the fewest forfeits, whether it's because of cheating, abuse, or poor clock management. And yes, I know there are many legitimate reasons for an individual player to forfeit a game.