Are we ready
for better tournaments?

By David Fatum

As some of you know, I lived and played up in Seattle for about two years before finding the sanctuary of the Phoenix sun. When players see the Seattle version of the Medallion, I get questioned a lot about the large number of shoots and $500/$1000 added tourneys.
It is true, in the greater Seattle area they have a lot more tournaments with a lot more GUARANTEED added shoots. However, these shoots are not dependent on a large number of players showing up to get the added money as promised. Phoenix has a larger population, with just as many bars, so why do they have so many shoots and we do not?
Could it be that it is sunny here and it rains there so they have to stay indoors? Do they have better players than us? Or maybe it is they like to compete more? Hmm… compete more… YES that is it! They do have better COMPETITION in Seattle, which in turn brings MORE players out to compete. Notice I did not say BETTER players. I said better competition, which is a direct result of strictly enforced handicapping of all the shoots.
I know to every “good” player here, the thought of not having a blind draw event is against the very nature of the game. Handicapping, for the “good” player, would ruin the fun of winning a shoot without losing a game when you draw another top player. So, I ask you to think about it for a second, would you rather COMPETE for larger payouts ($100-200 per player more often) in larger tournaments where you had to play well or would you be happy winning the occasional shoot and make $40-$60?
There are only a handful of good players, but there are hundreds of “not so good” players that never come to play in our shoots because they may feel they have no shot at winning even if they draw the hottest player in the room.
Now let’s define handicapping. There have been some futile attempts at having some handicapped events in the past. The local operator tried using a system that was designed for one arena and unsuccessfully applied it to a normal tournament so it did not go off as well as it could have.
In a fairly handicapped system, every player should have the same chance to be successful, which would come down to how well you shot at that moment, not how well you did in the draw. There are many ways to have these shoots - “bring your own” partners with a team cap (example: 20 points, or 6.0 combined Cricket for NDA), or to have “parity draws” in which a high rated player draws a low rated player and at the end of the draw, most teams are within a few handicap points of each other so the handicap is not such a factor.
The upside to handicapping is obvious to me. We would draw out a lot more players, the prize money goes up and you get to play a lot more tight matches. The negative is the player that tries to abuse the system. Some people refer to it as “sandbagging” but let’s call it what it really is, cheating, plain and simple.
Of course some players are going to have good games that are a bit higher than normal, but when it becomes the norm for a player to out shoot their rating, then a new rating is in order. This is where the tournament and league organizers come in. They need to watch players that try to cheat the honest player and re-rate accordingly to maintain the fairness of the tournaments.
I am not saying it should be easy for a lesser player to win. I am saying that, if we all had the same opportunity to win, then we would have much larger shoots and we would actually COMPETE more.
It is always a lot more fun to win a tight match that could have gone either way then it is to just blow away the other team. So the next time you get all excited about playing in a 250% payout and think it is a great tournament, just think about what could have been if the event was handicapped with 50+ teams showing up.
Go look at the Medallion from Seattle (view it online at www.themedallion.net) and just wonder how great Phoenix darts could be if we got to “compete” and play for all that money. Then again, what do I know about tournament darts?