Mike, please inform Skip that 6 players in a round-robin produces 15 matches, not 30 (Skip's way counts each match twice). That means that the round-robin stage of the event had 15 x 7 = 105 matches, not the 210 stated in his article.
Dear AtLarge,
I would like to thank you for correcting my math error in my report on the International Straight Pool Open. At first, I couldn't find the error, even after it was pointed out to me. I was stuck on 6 x 5 = 30 x 7 = 210. And then, miracle of miracles, I discovered a lesson I had learned almost 50 years ago in college, but never, in all of the intervening years, had cause to use. I offer the following by way of being an amusing anecdote, not an excuse for the error.
I had taken a college course in computer programming and as a final project, had decided to write a very simple program that would simplify a process in a board game called
Rail Baron. The board game was about moving a 'train' from one city to another on a United States map and at the end of one's trip (of which there would be many in the course of the game), you had to consult a printed chart to learn how much money you had earned to make a specific trip. The chart was large and the print very small; one of those charts with a horizontal and vertical axis. Find the city you were in when you began your game 'trip' and then finger along one axis until you located the destination along the opposite axis. At that junction would be the amount you had earned. The print size was so small that it made discovering the amount a challenge. The process was simple enough, it was just hard to read.
All I wanted my program to do when it was launched was to offer me a blinking cursor into which I would type a city name, after which it would offer me a second blinking cursor into which I would type a second name. I would hit 'return' again and the program would give me the answer. No bells, train whistles or graphics, just a written answer.
I had the program figured out all right. It was . . . maybe 10 lines of coding and then came the data entry. I had to input every city on the map and all of the amounts in the handwritten chart into the program, one at a time and in a very specific order. But before I could do that, I consulted with my professor, who explained a very simple and incredible time-saving line into the program, which essentially told the machine that a 'trip' in the game from San Francisco to Boston would yield the same money result as a trip from Boston to San Francisco. It was a single programming line that 'said' that the trip from any City A to any City B equals the amount of a trip from any City B to any City A. It cut my data entry work in half. And when that data entry got underway, I was truly thankful that I didn't have to do the hundreds of individual entries twice.
And that was the mistake I made in my calculations of the number of matches that 42 entrants in the International Straight Pool Open had played in the round robin phase of the tournament. While true that six competitors in each round robin flight played five matches, each one of those matches was repeated in the opponents' calculations; that when Player A played versus Player B, Player B was playing the same match against Player A. So, as you rightfully pointed out, my 'method' counted each match twice.
So again, I appreciate the correction and the opportunity it offered me for the trip down memory lane. It's not a lesson I'm likely to forget twice. Good thing, because if it was going to take another 50 years before I was able to use it again, I'd be long gone.
