Phoenix needs fair handicaps

By marty Scarborough

There are three types of dart tournaments being run all over the country today:

1. Non-Handicapped

These would include blind draws or luck-of-the-draws, where every player in the tournament has an equal chance to be drawn by every other player. These also include open tournaments, where everyone is entered equally, and the lowest rated player may have to play the highest rated without any advantage. Almost all of your steel-tip tournaments across the country (with the exception of Phoenix, Arizona) fall into this category.

Most of the better players like these tournaments. They have worked long and hard to get their game up, and they don’t want to lose to someone who hasn’t because of a handicap system.

2. Handicapped

It doesn’t matter if you use a parity draw, spot dart, cap, or any other system. They are all a handicap in some way. For your major league tournaments such as Medalist or the NDA, they handicap it by limiting the point value you can have to play in a certain level. They can restrict a team to a certain PPD or MPR value and break it into levels this way.

Local blind draw tournaments may do a parity draw or restricted draw. An example of this might be to say that Medalist players rating below a 6 can’t draw each other, or any players rated above a 12 can’t draw each other. These systems are designed to try to give the lower-rated players a chance to win. However, the problem with every handicap system is sandbaggers, and no one has come up with a fix for that yet.

3. The Phoenix Arizona Handicap

In Phoenix, we have come up with our own handicapping system. We call it the “Women-Don’t-Draw-Women” method, and almost every local tournament is using it. It isn’t fair, it isn’t right, but we do it anyway. I don’t know who started it; I think I know why, but I don’t know why we continue to do it.

The way this works is that we let all the women draw first, and they can’t draw each other. It doesn’t matter what their average or ranking is, they can’t draw another woman. Since about 90 percent of the players in Phoenix who can average over a 3.5 are men, this gives women an advantage in every tournament. It doesn’t matter how many players you have, the women have a better chance of drawing someone who shoots above a 3.5 than any man there.

At a recent tournament, we had 80 players – 30 women and 50 men. We had 20 guys but only three women who could average over a 3.5. That meant every woman there had about a 40 percent chance (20 out of 50) of drawing a player who could shoot a 3.5 or higher; however, the men only had a 28 percent chance (23 out of 80).

Now the problem with this, is that in this particular tournament, there were three guys playing who were brand new. They averaged about 1.5 MPR. There were also a couple guys there who have been playing a while, but still shoot a 2.0 or less. Most of the ladies in the tournament averaged between 2.5 and 3.0 MPR; some less, some more, but that is where most of them would fall.

So can someone explain to me a handicap system that gives a 2.5 or 3.0 shooter an advantage over a 1.5 or 2.0 shooter, simply because they are a woman? Or why the three women who can average a 3.5 get an advantage over someone who has been shooting for only one week, who averages a 1.5?

Another recent large tournament ran so that if a team had a lady on it, they got to start every game. So, say one of the ladies who averages a 3.5 draws a guy who averages a 4.0. They are playing two guys who average a 2.0-2.5. The team with the lady destroys the other team in the first game, and then because they have a lady on the team, they get to start the second game anyway! Yeah, that seems fair.

I would get laughed at if I played any other sport in the Phoenix area and said I wanted to handicap it based on nothing other than a player’s sex. Imagine bowling, where nine pins counts for a strike, or softball, where you get five strikes, or volleyball, where you can play on a two foot platform – all if you are a woman; suggest any of these based strictly on the fact that the player is a woman, and you would get thrown out on your ear. There are laws in this country that make it illegal to discriminate based on sex.

Imagine if I ran a dart tournament and said white people can only draw white people or Catholics can only draw Catholics. How many of you think I would get away with it? I’d have the ACLU protesting outside my dart tournaments.

If you want to run a tournament and you want to give some advantage to lower-rated players, fine. I’ll still show up, I’ll still play – I just love playing darts. But to handicap a tournament based on anything other than dart ability is just plain wrong!