Clutch fun

‘May the best scoring system win!’ is hardly a sentiment to stoke the passions. In the 2011 referendum, the alternative vote (AV) system was mooted to replace first-past-the-post. The electorate didn’t care for AV, which lost by two votes to one. Indeed, people didn’t much care for the issue at all: the 42 per cent turnout was far feebler than 72 per cent for the Brexit referendum in 2016. The fact remains — how you keep score does matter. In elections, the ‘popular vote’ does get counted, but it isn’t usually what counts, much to the chagrin of, say, Hillary Clinton’s supporters in 2016. In sport, as in politics, much depends upon the scoring system, even as we know that the exact details are arbitrary.

Of course, it must be fair — a legitimate winner is essential. But even ‘fair’ is not a constant. In world championship matches, a tie was once treated as a victory for the incumbent, with the onus on the challenger to depose him. Kramnik, Kasparov, Botvinnik and Lasker all benefited from this privilege, which is now regarded as an anachronism; Carlsen has twice defended his classical title in a rapid playoff.

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Andrew Watts

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Besides fairness, one should favour a system that is hard to game. At the 1962 Candidates tournament in Curaçao, a round-robin (i.e. all-play-all) event, Fischer protested that his Soviet opponents would agree draws among themselves, to save their energy for beating him. In the next cycle, a knockout format was preferred, which drastically limits the scope for collusion. Another system vulnerable to gerrymandering is ‘football scoring’, which awards 3/1/0 for win/draw/loss respectively. It has its merits, and sometimes gets an outing in chess tournaments, but players who meet twice might be tempted to exchange friendly fire and harvest three points each, instead of the two that would result from a pair of draws.