Britcon 2013

[Robert241167]

Don't forget to remind Phil and Dave about us kicking their backsides this weekend Spike !!

Rob

[spike]

Don't forget to remind Phil and Dave about us kicking their backsides this weekend Spike !!

Rob

The loss was not Phil's fault was it, it was just Dave being hopeless

[philqw78]

Don't forget to remind Phil and Dave about us kicking their backsides this weekend Spike !!

Rob

Pride and fall Taylor. look out.

[peterrjohnston]

Submarining is the art of deliberately or accidentally dropping a few points so that you are lower in the draw in the hope of gaining an easier game(s) and thus leapfrogging the players above you who in theory will have had more challenging games and opponents. Sometimes it works....sometimes it doesn't.

I don't think I've seen it used as a deliberate strategy, and it would be very hard to come back to win a tournament after suffering a heavy loss in the first game. I have seen examples though of people who seem to have had an easier draw after suffering an early setback overhauling players who have had a series of tough games near the top of the leaderboard to claim a place.

Some years ago, in the DBM era, one non-UK player did manage to win Britcon after losing the first game. The English, being naturally perfidious, assumed that this was a deliberate tactic, gave it the name submarining, and have been trying to emulate it ever since. Unfortunately they overlooked one important aspect; the player in question followed his loss by five straight and rather comprehensive wins. As the typical English player is incapable of playing for anything other than a draw, the attempts to emulate this so-called tactic have failed ever since.

Have I offended everyone yet?

[timmy1]

Peter

You have missed out the French...

[kevinj]

Have I offended everyone yet?

Yes - you have used the word "perfidious" inappropriately. Either "suspicious" or "mistrustful" would have been fine.

[peterrjohnston]

Choice of words, like English, was deliberate...

Seriously, with a Swiss-system draw and a scoring system like 25-0, unintentional "submarining" is going to happen - it's one advantage of using both, a player can recover to do well after one bad result. However, if you look at past Britcon results, to win as a minimum you need to get at least 3 wins and 3 "non-losing" draws, so losing a game means looking for 4 wins. Such consistent performance is hard to achieve, making submarining as a deliberate tactic even harder.

In addition, as a deliberate tactic and as others have pointed out, it requires that both that you can win against theoretically slightly-weaker players, not a given, and ignores the points you give away by losing.

The only way to truly eliminate it, both unintentional and intentional, would be to go back to straight knock-out as the Nationals (the forerunner to Britcon) used to be. But who would want to do that? (Possibly Phil, it would give him even more drinking time )

[philqw78]

go back to straight knock-out as the Nationals (the forerunner to Britcon) used to be. But who would want to do that? (Possibly Phil, it would give him even more drinking time

Who is this Phil bloke? I'd like to meet him. But I obviously wouldn't get the chance in that version of competition as I would have to play all weekend, only to sober up for the last game and blow it.

[timmy1]

It was just about believable until that bit about you sobering up...

[ShrubMiK]

Yes you've offended me!!!

"Submarining" was being talked about extensively back in the 80's and possibly even earlier, when there was a big boom in the use of Swiss system for weekend chess tournaments in the UK.

Often in a jokey way by a player explaining how they screwed up early on but then recovered to a position of respectability by the end.

Just so you know

[philqw78]

I prefer the story about insidious foreign interlopers ruining British fair play

Much more believable than a British chap having invented such subterfuge

[Caliph]

I'm not impressed - no 25mm FoG. A new army to use and confident of my finishing position whatever my opponents.

[madaxeman]

I'm not impressed - no 25mm FoG. A new army to use and confident of my finishing position whatever my opponents.

Hi Caliph

As everyone knows we were a long way behind when we picked up Britcon this year, and as a consequence we are rather forced to be less ambitious with what we are trying to achieve this time around - better to put on a good medium sized Britcon that moves the event forwards rather than to try and photocopy the monster editions of the past with too little lead time and end up falling short.

Part of this is behind the intention to fill up the two main rooms first, and only add extra rooms as and when and if we have solid demand for them. Even then we do not want to spread the event out too far across the building (so we will not include some of the very small rooms on different floors which are so far away that we always get complaints, and where the cost of room hire also exceeds the revenue from the players we can accommodate in them!).

The other part our "cautious progress" plan is that we did want to accommodate some of the "new" rulesets out there this year, as Britcon has been pretty stale in this respect over recent year with the last new set to be added prior to FoGN probably being FoW (!!).

With Saga and others however we have seen a huge amount of new interest and we wanted to try and give a few of them a chance this year to see if they could gain critical mass and bring a new set of gamers into Britcon who we can then build on going forwards. This combination of "caution+innovation" inevitably meant that some scales and rulesets would (of course) have to take a back seat this time around. Ideally we'd keep them all, but that is not the situation we are in this year I'm afraid

Looking across the periods we decided to let 40k, 25mm FoGAM, Armati, and WAB all take a back seat in 2013, and also to combine the two FoW periods into just one. This may well fit more easily into the building, and gives us a chance to try and introduce 3 new periods as well.

The ones we dropped were largely (but not entirely) chosen partly on the basis of them being among the least well attended periods last year, and 25mm FoG was very much in this category, with (I think) only 8 or so players last year. Given we still have two 15mm FoG periods, we also felt that FoG players were still on the whole well served by Britcon even if we did drop the 25mm scale. That in essence is why 25mm FoG AM didn't make the cut this time around.

We are however keeping all of these (difficult) choices under constant review - we hope and intend to have more space (and maybe even a different venue) next year, and we are also monitoring the takeup of the new periods closely as well to see if they reach critical mass - nothing is set in stone and this year's roster of competitions isn't a template for future years.

I hope this gives you a clear picture of our thinking on this difficult choice and how we came to it - ideally everyone would be a winner and get to play with their favourite armies, scales and rulesets, but we are not operating in an ideal world scenario this year and so some difficult decisions needed to be made in order to make sure Britcon went ahead. Having said all that, having as many of the "big toys" as possible on display and on the tabletop is something we see as being a Very Good Thing overall, and as soon as we get the chance we will look to bring them back.

The other good news is that bookings are going well at the moment, and we are on track to end up with a sellout, which will give us a platform for future years. FoGAM Medieval is already at over 50% and Classical is also looking good so far too, so if you do have a 15mm army we'd be delighted to see you there - and with accommodation no longe rmandatory as part of the package you can still commute from Oldham again too!

tim

[Caliph]

Thanks for that reply - I'm pretty stunned by by the length and detail. I just rarely get to use my big toys, even at the club. If she'll let me (and I'm sure she will - how else will she get a virtually completely old man free weekend), I can just as easily come last in one of the 15mm periods instead.

[madaxeman]

So far we are really motoring on bookings for Britcon, and at the moment Medieval is just edging ahead of Ancients with 17 vs 15 bookings (although neither have more bookings than DBMM right now!):

If you are trying to avoid the tourney tigers or pick on the bunnies, the list of players so far in each period is as follows:

Ancients players so far:
Chris Proudfoot
David Finnigan
Dave Saunders
Graham Briggs
Andrew Ellis
Robert Amey
Graham Evans
Franck Cieur
Steven Hacker
Peter Card
Lynda Fairhurst
Phil Powell
Andrew Martin
Darrell Pearce
Tony Parkin

Medieval:
Gordon Jamieson
Jon Akers
Guillaume Fremont
Peter Dalby
Lance Flint
Paul Longmore
Martyn Simpson
Steve Clarke
Richard Love
Graham Fordham
Wayne Dare
Robert Taylor
John Patric
Eric Lajus
David Fairhurst
Dave Ruddock
Harrison Pearce


Entries are open at the booking site now

[philqw78]

So its medieval for bunnies.

[timmy1]

The players who draw Fairhurst and Dalby are really going to think they have drawn bunnies...

[dave_r]

The players who draw Fairhurst and Dalby are really going to think they have drawn bunnies...

Dave's a complete bunny until you kill one of his generals.

[davidandlynda]

I'm usually 10-0 down to you at that point as well,yet somehow you still contrive to lose Dave
David

[davidandlynda]

Lynda has suggested she knit a surfing bunny as a prize for the best surfing performance
David