circle scenarios

[abstract]

a few situations...which, in the judges eyes, is stronger?

variety round:

a) 1 high variance ( unique ) string repeated 3 times

b) 3 low variance strings, each focused on different components

( assume same # of contacts for each )

density round:

c) 25 blurry whirls

d) 25 contact genuine

[Anz]

It's hard to answer to either of your examples.

In variety phase links can (should) also be taken into account, for example Stepping out of Whirl, Double Down and Drifter rather than just Butterfly.

In any case you should do different concepts in each turn of variety phase, if you repeat the same tricks and links in your second run you sort of miss your turn even if you do contacts. This may fool some judges though. Also in variety it's plus if you do tricks other players in the same circle don't do, so that must be taken into account too.

In variety bothsidedness is a big plus. If one player does Drifter and Whirl on one side, and other player does Whirl on both sides it's sort of a tie, but the one who used both sides barely wins.


In density phase the idea is more in linking tricks. 25 Blurry Whirls is pretty dense, 25 Genuine might not be dense at all if there's a lot of dexless tricks and easy links.

Ground rule in density phase is that dexless tricks and BOPs are bad, shuffle and a lot of dexes are good.
Of course for example Double Spinning Osis > In-mobius has only one dex, but still pretty dense - you get the picture.

[Outsider]

Good question -- this has been on my mind lately...

Also, thanks for the answer, Anssi.

In any case you should do different concepts in each turn of variety phase, if you repeat the same tricks and links in your second run you sort of miss your turn even if you do contacts. This may fool some judges though. Also in variety it's plus if you do tricks other players in the same circle don't do, so that must be taken into account too.

Ah, as a competitor that is music to my ears!

I do want to explore this topic a little more, though.

For instance, I've judged a few circle contests in the past, and its a pretty hard job. What we judges have usually done is to RANK each player relative to one-another after each player takes one turn. So, after one round of variety strings, we number each player 1, 2, 3, or 4, as in -- who did the best, next best, and last in that turn.

In simples terms, after 3 turns of variety strings, each player has 3 scores, and the player with LOWEST total score (the score of all 3 stings added together) could be said to have won the Variety round...

However, scoring this way only really takes into account the variety within a given string, relative to the variety of another competitor's string in that same turn. So, scoring this way does NOT really take into account the idea that a player may demonstrate very little variety from one string to the next, when comparing the 3 or 4 strings of just that particular player. Or, a player may have AVERAGE variety in any given one string, but their variety when taking all 3 or 4 strings into account might be much greater than any other competitor...

I would be interested to hear from anyone with lots of JUDGING experience with ideas on how judges can better run the judging to get the best scores possible. Any tips, any methods -- not just on what judges should be looking for but some easy-to-use METHOD to produce good scores.

(my problem has been , with four players each doing a string, and then another round of the same, and then another round of the same, it is hard to remember who did what AFTER 3 turns (12 strings), so the method I described above helps with that problem because, each time around, the judges only really have to remember the last 4 strings, and then they can kind of clear their mind for the next 4 strings... but that causes the other problem...)

[abstract]

thank you both for amazing replies. )

In any case you should do different concepts in each turn of variety phase, if you repeat the same tricks and links in your second run you sort of miss your turn even if you do contacts.

ty anssi, this was the crux of my first scenario. jon's response about the practicality of judging all 3 strings makes this an interesting topic.

ty also for breakdown of density round, that helps a lot for preparation.

[CIC flurry]

RANK each player relative to one-another after each player takes one turn.

That's technically not the way you're supposed to do it.

From http://www.footbag.org/rules/chapter/500#507,

B. Assignment of Scores: Judges shall assign subjective scores for each player at the end of each phase, based on the aggregate performance of each player across all three of their turns within that phase.

In terms of practice, for each turn I give a number of 1-10 not relative to the other players, just on 1 being bad and 10 being very good. Just helps to remember the impression. Also i try to quickly write notes on links and moves (this is hard to do). Then at the end I give the best guy a 10 and everyone else relative to him.

[Anz]

Everybody should read those rules, be they judging or just competing.

And yes, you shouldn't grade the players after each round. The three turns in one phase are treated like one run.

I might have the most experience judging Circle in big tournaments, I've judged finals in one USO, two Euros and three Worlds.

Every experienced judge has their own system to write down notes. I know some don't use any notes, but it doesn't seem very professional, because it needs so much concentration to keep everything in mind.

I don't recommend writing down words, I know someone writes down tricks in the middle of runs, but doing that makes you miss some parts of the string. Besides circle shouldn't be won with single tricks, so it can fool the judge as well.

I myself use simple symbols that you can quickly sketch down between players after each run. For example a vertical line, horizontal line and circle are fast to draw, you just need to know yourself what they mean after the phase is done and you try to remember what went down. You don't have to explain yourself after, so nobody else needs to understand your little sketches. For me this works very well, and I know many other experienced judges who use it.

Usually a "good" player gives the right scores to each competitor. Steve was just talking about this at the judges meeting in Helsinki. The scores are often really close to each other.

Also while it's not allowed for judges to discuss about the scores they are about to give while they are giving them, they can discuss about what went down. You can ask the other judges "Did Milan hit Blurry Whirl bsos in the first run, or does my memory fool me?"

[Jeremy]

a few situations...which, in the judges eyes, is stronger?

variety round:

a) 1 high variance ( unique ) string repeated 3 times

b) 3 low variance strings, each focused on different components

( assume same # of contacts for each )

density round:

c) 25 blurry whirls

d) 25 contact genuine

I would go with a) and d).


From my experience judging circle and competing in it, you're not likely to remember the runs of one player very well, and so I doubt you'd even notice that they'd hit they same run 3 times. Instead you'd remember that they hit a good run with a lot of variety for each turn. Perhaps if they hit some particularly unusual combos, you might remember those bits being repeated, but with two runs between them, it would be difficult to remember (unless those runs were short I guess). I also think that runs focusing on a particular component are low diversity. You may hit 15 unique moves ending with a drifter, but that just means you don't have much downtime variety. Focusing on three components is also not much variety. I'd assume the good run repeated three times would have a lot more than 3 components.

Regarding your second scenario, while the 25 blurry whirls is "dense," so is 25 genuine. What's more, 25 blurry whirls is only 2 links (one on each side) repeated, while it's obviously more difficult to be able to execute a broader range of links. In fact I'd say, if you're judging the difficulty of links (which is what density is supposedly judging, although I think the concept is still a bit fuzzy), then variety of links shown is an important component of difficulty - it is more difficult to be able to link more moves, than to just link two moves.

Of course as people said, there is a bit of vagueness about these answers, and the specific runs would be important - perhaps one looks very sloppy and out of control while the other doesn't? Perhaps the genuine run still doesn't have much variety? My answers are, of course, just generalisations.

I helped write the formal rules for circle comp, and I guess it's probably my fault that the rules on .org refer to clauses not actually in the document

[Outsider]

you're not likely to remember the runs of one player very well, and so I doubt you'd even notice that they'd hit they same run 3 times. Instead you'd remember that they hit a good run with a lot of variety for each turn...

I also think that runs focusing on a particular component are low diversity.

Thanks, Jeremy. This is the problem that I'm getting at AS A JUDGE. While I disagree that "scenario A" SHOULD win a variety round, I think it probably might win because of those issues of perception and memory -- in circle there just isn't much time for judges to TAKE-IN and consider what they've just seen -- the next competitor is usually starting to play before I've had a chance to make any notes at all. If I'm making notes, I'm missing what the next competitor is doing, which is totally bad for a judge to do, obviously.
I disagree with the second quote in particular IN THE CONTEXT THAT the following two runs would then focus on OTHER COMPONENTS -- over-all, this could be one good way to demonstrate alot of variety over three turns, but, as Jeremy said, in any given turn a judge may conclude a simple "low variety" in his thoughts, without much recall of what happens from a given competitor's first run to that same competitor's next run, because he will be distracted by three other competitors in quick succesion.
Ideally, in the variety phase, a good competitor would have good variety within each string, and each string would have substantially different content from the other strings, but, thats alot to ask from most competitors, and a judge is rarely comparing an ideal competitor vs. another ideal competitor, or an ideal competitor vs. a clearly lesser competitor -- more realistic is that a judge is picking the best of several imperfect competitors. Also keep in mind that World Championships is not the only competition that matters -- Worlds may be the competition that matters most, but I'm more often judging a much smaller competition, and I take my job to produce good judging results pretty seriously at every competition, no matter how small. My point is that most of the judging I'm doing is not trying to compare one world-champion contender against another, its trying to compare one intermediate player against another.

Anyway, I still sort of like my "Rank Each String Against the Other Strings in that Particular Turn, and then Repeat Two Or Three More Times" method, but I understand now that ranking this way may be contrary to the intent of the rules of Circle Contest. I like CIC flurry/Tom's idea of just using a "Scale of 1 to 10" approach. I think its not really true to say that this "Scale of 1 to 10" score would not be relative to the other competitors... my scoring is always going to be relative to the competitors in that particular contest --- Again I'll point out that I'm not always judging a big contest with many top-tier shredders. So, if I'm at a small tournament with players not as good as Jim Penske and Honza Webber, I'm not automatically going to decide that "none of these competitors is really capable of scoring a 9 or 10 on my scoring scale." Shredder X maybe cannot get a 10 for variety if he is competing against Jorden Moir, but if Jorden Moir is not there, Shredder X can score a 10 if he does very well relative to the other shredders at that small competition. To put it another way, my "Scale of 1 to 10" is going to be relative to the shredders who are actually at that particular competition, I wouldn't use some sort of idealized scale that only the world's best players can score perfect 10's, even though those players are not at the competition I'm judging -- a score of 10 on my scale would be an exceptionally good run for what I think the competitors in my contest are capable of.

Anyway, if I go with "Rank 1 through 4" or if I use "score on a scale of 1 to 10", I think in the future I'll try using an idea that I've just had to assign a sort of "meta-score" -- if a competitor does three strings in a variety round, I'd informally score each string 1-10, and then also give an over-all score, a score to reflect variety from one string to the next. So, three strings will have 4 scores. I think this might solve my little judging problem. Does anybody else have an opinion on this, or any other practicle ideas to help judges accurately judge Circle Contest?

[abstract]

another question i had about variety is string extension via bails.

is a player going for sheer quantity of unique tricks & links? if so, reset via bail to fit in more total tricks is in favour. ( think vasek's 3 minute run from a few years back, which had something like 70 or 80 butterflies )

is a player going for ratio of unique tricks & links within a string? as in, each butterfly you do beyond the first would degrade the quality of your variety string. if so, bail resets are not in favour.

[Jeremy]

You're right Jon, I was a little confused between "would" with "should."

On the other hand, and it obviously depends on the actual runs, I think that if you have three runs each focused on just one component, then the total diversity of your runs would probably be much lower than one run of good diversity.

So lets say you have a shuffle run, a drifter run and a double dex run.

The shuffle run will be mainly basic sets and basic downtimes.

The drifter run will have drifter, pdx drifter, and possibly moves like vortex, blurry drifter, smoke and/or toe drifter, vertigo and perhaps the odd hard drifter move.

The double dex run will be mainly double downs and barrages.

What variety do we have - the shuffle run sets and downtimes are probably in both the other runs, the downtimes as bails, and the sets to the components. Then we have just the drifter component (admittedly of different difficulties), perhaps with odd spin or duck, and then we have probably 2 or 3 different double down moves, form different sets.

No torques, blenders, hardly any spins, or ducks, or symposiums, no swirls, or indeed any unusual surfaces, flyers, stylish muted tricks etc.

I think it's reasonable to say a run of good diversity would have many more components than that.

Of course with these kind of speculative questions, it's entirely possible that specific runs following the question could be better despite being focused on one component for each run, and it's obviously best to have three different runs of good diversity.

Regarding judging, when I judged at Aus champs I wrote a couple of really brief comments about each run, but either gave them an x or an arbitrary score in comparison to the runs in the circle (I guess relative to the first run that wasn't an x). I don't know what out of, perhaps 6. Then at the end of each phase I looked over my notes and scores and tried to come up with final score that reflected the overall quality - but it wasn't just adding up or averaging the runs, it was just an entirely new score.

another question i had about variety is string extension via bails.

is a player going for sheer quantity of unique tricks & links? if so, reset via bail to fit in more total tricks is in favour. ( think vasek's 3 minute run from a few years back, which had something like 70 or 80 butterflies )

is a player going for ratio of unique tricks & links within a string? as in, each butterfly you do beyond the first would degrade the quality of your variety string. if so, bail resets are not in favour.

I think this is a really good question, and I asked the same thing when the rules were discussed in the IFC, but didn't get a satisfactory answer. However I'd put it like this;

Bails are a bad thing, but short runs are worse. I think ideally runs would be ranked like this;

If two people do essentially the same run, but one has more bails than other, the run with less bails wins.

If one person does a short run with dense variety, and another does a longer run with less variety - it would depended on the specifics but the run with more variety should win.

However when I've competed in circle, and I'd recommend to other competitors, aim for long run length (in all phases). This means putting in more bails, but it's better to hit a long run with lots of bails and variety, than to push too hard and hit a very short run, that because it's short, has less variety too. Only if you're a really confident player would it be to your advantage to avoid bails. Play conservative. That really goes for all competitions, not just circle. Note how in sick 3 new players often drop every attempt, even though they can hit 3 moves in a row, while experienced players always hit combos. That's because new players often try to hit a combo that they can only hit a small percentage of the time, while experienced players at the very least start with a combo that they can hit 90% + of the time. In competition dropping is the worst thing you can do, so you should really aim to play at the highest level you can while being droppless.

[Outsider]

Well, at the least, it feels like a good discussion to me. Its good to ask these questions and talk about them.

For my part, I don't think many "bail" moves should really be counted against you in the VARIETY round of Circle Contest. OBVIOUSLY, bails in the DENSITY round will equate to a worse "score".

I think it depends a little bit on how one defines "BAILS" and just what standard one sets on them.

For many, "bails" pretty much means BOPs. To me, BOPs are the core of my game -- I can't really do much "genuine", whatever that means, and in all these years I've never really grown tired of osis and butterfly -- sometimes when I'm doing them they're bails (when I lack the control to do anything else), but, sometimes when I'm doing osis and butterfly, they're just a useful and flowy part of my freestyle. Basic clipper stalls or toe stalls or perhaps a leg-over in the middle of a string are, to me, REALLY bails, or, at least, bails every time (because you'd only do them as a last-ditch effort to avoid a drop), unlike BOPs which might or might not be bails depending on the circumstances. I don't rememeber the Circle Contest rules off the top of my head -- are their any rules that require one to pass when a competitor has bailed to basic clipper stalls or toe stalls in a run?

Obviously, when in competition, even if I'm using a substantial amount of BOPs in what I think of as "non-bail" circumstances, I would not expect to receive much credit for those moves, but then, I wouldn't expect to be penalize for using alot of them as a bridge to other better moves.

I would caution another competitor against using this as a strategy -- one will still use-up some of their energy even on easy BOPs... If you're not in really top-notch competitive shape, you might find your legs or lungs starting to tire-out before you've done the variety you were intending to do, if you take too much time doing too many BOPs in-between your real variety.
I mean, 30 BOPs is easy to do, but do 30 BOPs and then straight into a real string and you might find you don't have much gas left in the tank...

If two people do essentially the same run, but one has more bails than other, the run with less bails wins.

This makes perfect sense to me, but I certainly wouldn't apply this rule too rigidly.

[Jeremy]

Yeah, we obviously have to just generalise in these topics, while be specific in an actual competition.

I think an important consideration is "what is variety." To me, and I'm sure to most footbaggers it's more than just the raw number of moves. For example if I hit ripwalk>blur>magellan>atomsmasher>legbeater then I've hit 5 unique moves, and I haven't repeated a component, but if I hit gyro osis>ripwalk>ducking pdx mirage>drifter>torque the variety seems much higher, even though it's the same number of unique moves, and slightly less unique components.

I think variety is really not just about being different, but how different. Ripwalk and smear are not that different compared with, say, ducking clipper and dlo. When you're judging variety, or that phase of circle comp, I guess you need to take this into account.

I agree with what you're saying about bails and freestyle. When I'm not competing, and especially now that I have one shit knee, I rarely even play guiltless. Putting in bails and legovers isn't a problem for me. On the other hand, a competition is supposed to decide who is *best* and so all things being equal, you want to chose the person who does the hardest run, as defined by the rules.

For example if you hit ripstein>blurriest>fog>smoke>pdx torque>ripped warrior>ripped warrior and I hit the same run, but with 2 or 3 bops between each move, I've hit more unique moves, and surely slightly more variety, but at the same time, as a judge deciding who is best - I think it would be clear who to choose. You could perhaps justify the decision by saying that you're taking in to account variety of links (as you probably should), but I don't even think that's necessary. Your run is simply better than mine and should be judged so. You should still take into account difficult in all phases judging circle. One person hitting legover>mirage might be equal in pure terms of variety to double switchover>barrage, but the second combo still should win.

[Matt K]

You don't have to pass if you do a < 3 add move, but most people do because they don't know the exact rules. It's just something else that the judges have to consider. For example, doing a switch in the density phase is not particularly dense, so you should judge accordingly

[Jeremy]

When I've competed in circle I passed when I messed up, regardless of adds, which I think is generally good (non competitive) circle etiquette, or at least used to be. So if I hit a trick I thought was the, or I went to hit a hard move and bailed to something easier midway through, I pass.