As a reminder, my section (PNW) went to this format when the 40 & Over league switched to the 4-court format which brought 2-2 ties into play, as points per position and standings based on accumulated points allows weighting courts so a 2-2 tie on the court isn't a 2-2 tie in points, and it also removes the team win from being a factor in the standings. This was necessary as at the time the 4-court format was introduced, the National regulations did not say what would happen if there were a 2-2 tie that was tied on all the published tie-breakers. And it was occurring before National clarified the rules.
While some sections have used, and will continue to use, points per position for leagues regardless of the number of course, apparently those in my area responded to a survey saying they were not in favor of it and PNW listened and is changing back. I personally didn't mind points per position, I just considered it "different", but I expect folks will be more comfortable with the traditional way of doing standings.
But that begs the question of how 2-2 ties will now work?
The answer is it will work using the tie-breaker that National put in place after 2020 40 & Over leagues started when they discovered they hadn't accounted for everything, and that is that if the teams are still tied after the sets lost and games lost tie-breakers are applied, the winner of the team match will be the team that won court 1 doubles.
In the message received today, it was noted that the court 1 doubles winner would be the last tie-breaker, and also made the statement that it was rare for a match to get to the point of the court 1 winner deciding the team match winner. Well, if you have read my blog for long, you know something like that causes me to go look to see if the statement in fact is true.
I have researched this a bit before, in fact I looked at how often ties happened at 40 & Over Nationals a few weeks ago, but that was before all of 40 & Over was done, so taking a look again, there were 292 team matches played, 84 of them (29%) were 2-2 ties, 31 of these (11%) were also tied on sets, and finally 3 were tied on games as well and as a result were decided by the team that won court 1 doubles.
Now, three is not a lot, but that is out of 292 matches and three represents just over 1% of all matches. One percent probably does qualify as "rare", but clearly it does happen so one should not construe the claim of rare to mean it will probably never happen.
And before you say it is so "rare" that it would never happen in a meaningful match, one of the three occurrences was in the semi-final match for the 4.5 men, and another was in a match that decided who advanced to the semis for the 3.5 women. Matches don't get much more important than these.
But what about across all 40 & Over play? For 2021, there were 27,751 team matches played for 40 & Over using the 1 singles 3 doubles format, of these 7,204 (26%) ended in 2-2 ties, 2,927 (11%) were tied on sets, and 248 (1%) were tied on games. The percentages are remarkably close to those at Nationals.
So, with this rule in place, it appears one can expect 1% of matches to be decided by the court 1 winner.
I know many people, myself included, don't like the 4-court format, but given it is still here, do you prefer court 1 doubles deciding ties? Did you like points per position to just make 2-2 ties inconsequential? Or prefer another way to handle it?
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