I am currently running a BCA league. 14 teams, 5 guys on a team we play race to 13 just like the Vegas tournament. The league has gotten very top heavy. Only a few teams have any chance of winning it. I have kind of looked at ways to handicap it but so far not found anything. I want simple, easy for the team to figure out. I know you can use Fargo and figure out a fair play match between two players, Is the some sort of team system? something like add the 5 fargos for each team and the higher team goes to 13 but the lower goes to a lower number?
I am open to any suggestions.
Mark
I'm going to make a suggestion, and I urge you to read the whole thing before making a judgment:
Consider rather than handicapping going to team caps.
Start by analyzing the current teams. Add the ratings of the 5 main players for each team. Let's say
6 of the current teams are under 2300
another 4 are under 2500
and the top 4 teams are 2600, 2730, 2850, and 3000.
Create a cap such that all but the top two teams are fine as they are, say, 2750 here. For the next session, no team can be above 2750.
At this point you will need to live through some pain to get to the promised land. A few of your top players will act like you're sacrificing their first-born child. They will threaten to quit and talk about how they've been playing together since the civil war and the only reason they play is blah blah blah.
Remind yourself of three things.
(1) 60 of the 70 players in your league are on a team that does not need to change if they don't want to.
(2) The generally one person who departs each of the top two teams will likely still be part of a new team that can win the whole thing. For instance, when the 650 player leaves the top team and is replaced by a 400, that one player can make one of the middle-of-the-road teams competitive, maybe going from 2500 to 2700. Another possibility is your stud team breaks into two teams that are both competitive.
(3) Others who have made this transition would not go back--it works well.
By doing this change, you get a division where half the teams have a legitimate shot at a high finish, and that makes league night a lot more fun. And the lesser teams don't get pummeled so bad and have their own little victories.
A key is to keep this administratively easy. You don't want a team needing to break up mid season because ratings drifted. The solution is to record "original roster" ratings at the start of the session, and allow each player on an original roster to use the lower of origional roster rating and current rating for the purpose of meeting the cap. Any substitute player or late-added player uses current rating.
