Monday, May 6, 2024 (Court Day #655)
Today is the Dinko de Mayo event hosted by the club for members. I arrived at Willowbrook Park about 8:40 a.m. Parking was tricky, resulting in me circling the street twice until I gave up and parked on the side street. Registration had started at 8:30 a.m., so I wasn’t early. As requested by Pam, I carried in two metal padded folding chairs that I borrowed from work. She was super happy to see the chairs! “There his is!”
All five courts were full of players warming up. What was kind of wild was how many players that I didn’t know. Sure, I probably was acquainted with three-quarters of them, but the rest I’d never seen before . . . either they play at Willowbrook or maybe at Brommer or Derby on non-club days so we have different schedules.
For the event, the players were broken into two groups, the Notorious Nachos and the Taco Titans. I was in the Nachos group.
One of the two groups would play for a 10-minute period—games completed or not—then the other group would play. A horn would sound to start and also to end the 10-minute period. This would repeat for six games for each group for a total of twelve 10-minute periods. The players accumulating the most points would advance to the event’s playoffs.
Game #1
My first game was with Terry Rayburn against Amy Glasgow and her husband Mike Glasgow. Mike looked vaguely familiar, but don’t really know him. Amy and Mike are high 3.0 players. We went up 3-0, they came back to lead 9-7, we tied it up 9-9, then we went on to win 11-9. As with most games today, our opponents were targeting my partner.
Terry told me, “I predict you’ll be in the final four.” She was impressed with my play, obviously.
Game #2
I played with Carol Foster against René Baker and Lou Ann Lyon. It was back and forth and a close one. It was a fun one of a bit longer rallies. They scored a point just as the 10-minute horn blew and therefore won 9-8.
Game #3
Nancy Bennett and I played Stan Rathbone and Mike Fong. They scored the first point, but once Nancy and I got going, the outcome was pretty obvious. The horn blew and we were up 10-4. Mid-game, I started targeting Stan’s backhand. He’s a lefty, so I couldn’t just go on “auto-pilot”.
Game #4
I was paired with Sharon Rooney against Steve Bontadelli and Moe Rishi. They were targeting Sharon relentlessly. So much so that when the ball was coming to Steve’s forehand along his right sideline, I crept to my right, toward the middle, expecting a crosscourt shot to my partner but Steve took advantage and hit a passing shot to my left out of my reach. Oops. “I saw you moving.” Indeed, he did!
On another shot, Steve whipped a backhand sideline shot for a winner off of a low drive I was not expecting to come back. Sharon and I got creamed 11-4. Sharon, feeling bad, apologized to me after the game. Hey, it’s just for fun! As for me, I was disappointed in my play for this one, though I didn’t play badly—I just was dwelling on those two shots in particular that I misjudged and gave them those rallies.
Game #5
Amy Glasgow would be my partner against Paul Springer and Dina Schillings. Paulie, I know well. I’d never seen Dina before. Paulie was serving really well. I returned one of his serves long. Sometimes skills don’t match up between teams and one team has an unexpected advantage. We lost 11-3. Things were not going our way. The ball would clip the net and would drop over out of reach or bounce unexpectedly without time to properly react. Not that that was why we lost, but it didn’t help! I was disappointed in my play. This was the most challenging game of the day.
Amy said, “I hope I didn’t ruin your chances of the playoff.” I told her that Paulie and Dina played very well and it wasn’t all on her. And it wasn’t. Like I said, I missed a return. I popped up at least a couple shots. I didn’t adapt quickly enough to their style of play. It happens. Hats off to them.
Game #6
For the last game, I was paired with Moe Rishi against Melissa Fowler and Nancy Bennett. We won 11-2. That was a quick game. We decided to start a second game for fun with the extra time.
Playoffs
There were to be two playoff games. The top four point-getters of a respective group would play against each other and advance to the final. I wasn’t even in the top seven point getters of the twenty players in my group. With only six games, you only play with five partners out of a possible nineteen, so it’s far from a scientific evaluation of skill.
Each playoff game was very lopsided. I believe one game was 11-1—Jackie and Mauricio won—and the other game was 11-2 or 11-3, René and Rich won.
Dinko Championship Game
René and Rich Wilson (Nachos) played against Jackie and Mauricio (Tacos) in the final game. It was a well-played, closely-matched game. The final score was 14 -12. It was a fun game to watch. René and Rich pulled out the victory, but it could have gone either way.
Lunch
When all the festivities at Willowbrook were complete, we gathered at Beer Thirty in Soquel—which doesn’t serve food—for lunch. Mark Dettle went and picked up a whole bunch of burritos elsewhere for everyone as promised. People ordered their own beers at the bar, then took over the empty outside bench-style tables.
Midway through lunch, Pam asked how everyone felt about the format of the event. Generally, people liked it. Everyone gave Pam round of applause for her hard work organizing. She’ll be leaving the board this year; she’s already mostly moved to Paso Robles. I hope she likes heat, it gets darn hot down there during summer!
At 1:20 p.m., as I was about to leave, I thanked Pam again and shared that my preference was for the format used at the somewhat recent volunteers tournament of moving up a court and splitting when you win and moving down and splitting when you lose. I told her with the format used today it really depends on who your partner is and how much your opponents are going to target your partner. Pam told Mark—who was standing next to me—and me what she was thinking when she saw the results, which was, “Andrew isn’t gonna be happy about this.” We all laughed. I shrugged my shoulders and said. “Yeah, I was a little disappointed. But, hey, It’s only a recreational event.”
Drilling Appointment
Mauricio suggested we drill this week—our second such drilling session. We settled on Wednesday morning.
From the group lunch, it was home, shower, then off to work!
Tournament Saturday
René and I will be playing in the tournament hosted by John Connors and Eddy at Brommer this weekend. We tentatively planned to meet up on Thursday evening at Skypark to play as a team in preparation.
I paid my registration—John reminded me!—tonight, by Zelle transfer.
Later Tournament Analysis
So, you might wonder about how I—and perhaps other stronger players—didn’t end up in the payoffs for this tournament. That’s not to say that there weren’t strong players in the playoffs, there certainly were, just probably not the optimal selection of players. And—who knows?—given the day, maybe I even didn’t deserve to be in those playoffs.
And why is it not optimal?
Let’s do some analysis. So, there were 20 players in my group. We played 6 rounds of 5 games for a total of 30 games. But just how many games would you have to play to make sure all possible combinations were exhausted and also the most fair?
First off, here’s what I got from ChatGPT…
But you can’t always trust ChatGPT and when I shared this with my UCLA cum laude Applied Mathematics son Nicholas, he wasn’t convinced that this was the correct answer.
Soooo…
Let’s take a look at possible games for just 4 players (labeled A, B, C, and D):
So, with just 3 games, you’ll cover all the possible combinations for 4 players.
Now, let’s expand the pool to 6 players instead:
So, you there would have to be 45 games played to cover all the combinations for 6 players. That got really big really fast. We added just three players and it went from 3 needed games to 45 needed games. Given that we played only 30 games for 20 players in the Dinko tournament, we can already see that there’s no way we covered all the combinations.
Now, let’s move up to 10 players, then some extrapolation:
Using math and a formula, we can extrapolate the number of games required for a given number of players. I added groups of 8, 10, and 20 in additional to the 4 and 6 already shown above. Since the formula counts “AB vs. CD” as a different game than “CD vs. AB”, we have to divide the total game combinations by 2.
What we learn is that to make the Dinko de Mayo tournament 100% fair and to completely evaluate 20 players so all possible pairs play each other, there would need to be 14,535 games played! If we did “2 out of 3” games, to get the best sense, then we’re back to 29,070 games.
In math, there is talk about “exponential growth”, but combinations like this are “factorial growth” which gets crazy big very fast. It’s a field of mathematics known as combinatorics. I did get an “A” in my college combinatorics class, but that was decades ago, and so I had to look up a lot of this!
Number of days on a court: 655
Number of total hours: 2,806
Number of paid coaching hours: 33
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