Thursday, December 6, 2007
Game of the Year Preview
I already outlined in a previous post what will be involved in the Game of the Year Contest, but now that the season is officially over, and this will be the main attraction of the off season, I'll give you readers the complete scoop on what exactly will happen.
First off, there will be twenty games in this contest with prizes going to the top five which are:
1st: $1000
2nd: $500
3rd: $300
4th: $200
5th: $100
The scoring for this year's contest will be the same system as used last year. Each judge will rank their choices in order from 1st - 20th with the game they pick 20th getting 1 point, 19th getting 2 points, and so on with 1st getting 20 points and then the games are ranked by highest total score. The games will be released in the same fashion as last year: one game per week starting with 20th up to 1st (and for those wondering, yes that means that no one other than the Commissioner will know which game won until the middle of May!). Note my stressing that only the Commissioner will be privy to the overall results (this goes out to all who were pestering me last year trying to get inside information about which game won ahead of time -- understand now, I know nothing!).
The five judges for this year's contest are:
FM Robby Adamson
NM Dennis Monokroussos
GM Alex Shabalov
WGM Jennifer Shahade
FM Ron Young
Now, as noted above, there will be twenty games in this year's contest compared to only thirteen last year. The seven additional games (along with the thirteen Games of the Week) are the "Wildcard" games picked by the three Game of the Week judges: Jonathan Hilton, Greg Shahade, and myself. This was a fairly straightforward process with Jonathan getting the first pick, Greg the second, and myself the third. We then repeated this process to bring us up to six Wildcards. The final game we obtained via an email debate amongst the three of us (and trust me it wasn't pretty with many names and insults being thrown around in the process). But we finally did manage to come to an agreement on the final game, and so all the Wildcard selections are complete.
Well what are they you ask? Unfortunately, as is Greg's wont, you will have to endure a bit more torture before you find out as we will be releasing them in two day intervals starting in the next day or so. So keep an eye out to see if your favorite game which didn't manage to win Game of the Week will have a chance to redeem itself in the Game of the Year Contest!
Do the Game of the Year judges take into account the context of the game itself? Or are they strictly going on the game? For instance, if a particular judge did not follow the USCL closely, will that judge be told that Bhat was living off the increment is his game against Nakamura?
ReplyDeleteWell for the most part it will be left up to the judges themselves to decide what criteria they hold most important etc. in determining their rankings (they can decide whether quality, excitement, intrigue, etc. is most important to them). They will of course have access to all of our write-ups for Game of the Week and thus our comments on the games so they should be aware of things like you mentioned like the fact that Bhat was living off the increment vs. Nakamura. Again, how important they think that is, well that's up to them!
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