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Comment by Scarblac | Hacker News Reader

It's strange to reward slower contestants in sports.

IIRC Ecclestone suggested getting rid of qualifiers and just putting the F1 cars n the inverse order of their last race. This idea was in order to get more overtakes (the best parts of F1 races). I think it would be great.

Makes sense. More interest in F1. More money for Bernie.

1. Ecclestone has been out of the sport for nearly a decade.

2. A race weekend is a three-day affair, with tickets sold for each day. What do you do on Saturday if there are no qualifs?

> What do you do on Saturday if there are no qualifs?

Can you imagine Monaco with no quali >_<

Three races per weekend?

F1 is dead boring anyway, you're more there for the ambience and the VIP lounges and whatnot.

There was a period in World Rally Championship history when the top drivers would manipulate the starting order for the following day's stages by intentionally slowing down before the end of the stage. It was bizarre to watch teams intentionally give up 10+ second margins when stage wins can come down to half-second gaps.

In the BTCC, there was a similar situation for a while: in one of the races, the best-perfoming half of the pack would start at the back of the grid, and the worst-performing half at the front of the grid - but in-order within the two groups. However, since 2006 there has been some randomness added to the grid positioning, which makes attempting to manipulate it a risky business.

In F1 they also introduced DRS in 2011 to get more overtakes

Not that strange. Handicaps are quite common.

Just thinking if it's done F1 style it is fair. It's fresh at each competition.

If it's based on past times that creates possibly a feedback loop but depends on details. E.g. can a swimmer use a non competition record towards their qualification.

yeah, otherwise good ppl will do bad in qualifiers to get good position...

Reminds me of the final boss in Smash Bros. If you purposefully let him whip you at first, the adaptive play would nerf him enough to let you easily finish him.

Works for Mario Kart

Track & Field races stagger the starting positions, to compensate for the outer lanes of the track being longer. American football has the teams switch goals every quarter, to even out the advantages of having the wind at your team's back.

Why should swimming be different?

Your examples are about making circumstances equivalent, thus canceling out any advantage. There's no way to e.g. switch lanes in swimming so we're bound to have some contestants advantaged.

In cases where some contestants have to be advantaged, the conventional solution in sports is to advantage the ones who performed better according to some metric.

I think it's unfair to reward those who were lucky or already advantaged somehow, but my wife who has a background in track and field thinks anything else would be unfair.

> ... no way to e.g. switch lanes in swimming so ...

Why couldn't you shorten the pool, from a swimmer's PoV, by putting (say) a very shallow plywood box against the wall of the pool at one end of each "non-center" lane? Yes, you might need to do some math & stats to figure out just how shallow a box. Or, you could use a feedback loop - boxes start very shallow, leading swimmers get to pick a lane, boxes adjusted, repeat.

if there is an advantage to a lane in swimming can't we add a certain small amount of time to compensate

It's very difficult to quantify the advantages of the middle lanes: it strongly depends on the style, swimmers, and pool.

How about separate pools for each lane?

Smaller pools are slower.

I believe the main reasoning why this is fair is that this advantage is earned.

Would it be fairer to use randomly assigned lane? Then you get almost equal competitors in advantageous and disadvantageous lanes?

Isn't the top result in a year also used for qualification purposes (and thus lane assignment) for top-level competitions? Basically, you earn a spot in the best lane throughout the calendar year.

When I hear of an advantage being earned, I imagine it would go to the one who has put in the most effort, or been most inventive. Here, it goes to the one with the best metric. Metrics are a proxy for effort/inventiveness, but far from perfect. (As any software developer in a large organisation can attest.)

NFL playoffs give home field advantage to the teams with the better regular season records.

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