Allocating prizes and rounding

[adhawkins]

Hi all,

Not sure if this has been discussed before, but here goes.

Recently I've been running tournament very successfully using Tournament Director. However, I've found that if I let it automatically calculate prizes with rounding (I generally tell it to round prizes to the nearest £10), then it very often allocates more to prizes than there is in the prize pool.

When it does that, I make a note of the prizes it's calculated, and then manually set each place to a fixed amount, and adjust one of the payouts to account for the over-allocation.

Is this something that's known about and down to be fixed?

Thanks

Andy

[tandemrx]

See this recent thread: http://thetournamentdirector.net/forums/index.php?topic=641.0

You just need to set up prizes to share leftover pot.

Actually, I think that for some reason the default auto-prize suggestion does have the prizes "share the leftover pot" set up as a standard, EXCEPT, when there are between 10-18 people in the tourney, then it isn't set up to automatically share any leftover (not sure why).

I changed this for my auto-prizes set-up (along with a couple other things), but fiddling with that auto-prizes .xml file is maybe considered an "intermediate" TD skill (see section 27 in the help file)

Corey, is there a reason why the default auto-prizes config file has the share leftover pot set to false for 10-18 players?

[Corey Cooper]

Rounding works on all prizes, regardless of type, but is mostly intended for prizes that are designated as a percentage of the pot.

When prize values are determined, the software first calculates each prize amount (prize pool times each prize's percentage).  Then rounding is applied to each prize.  The rounding done is exactly what the user sets it to be: rounded up to the next N, rounded down to the next N, or rounded to the nearest N.  [Or not rounded at all.]

After doing this, the prize amounts might total to greater (or less than) the prize pool.  This is just a consequence of rounding.  How to fix this?  Fixing this is done by subjectively taking some amount from some prize(s), or adding some amount to some prize(s).  AKA "moving the money around."  Key word here is "subjective".  The software really knows very little about your prizes, and programming the software to "move the money around" would not be subjective, it would be a lot closer to "arbitrary".  If the software were to do this, inevitably there would be complaints that it "should take the money from THIS prize, or THAT prize, etc", because the software just doesn't have enough information to make this kind of determination *for* the user.  So it doesn't do it.  That is left as an exercise for the user.

adhawkins: You don't need to go back and change the prizes to a "fixed" amount just to deal with this issue.  You can either (a) adjust the amount of one or more of the prizes (the "Adjust by" field takes a positive or negative amount); or (b) override the amount

tandemrx: who knows?  Most likely when I was testing this feature I was changing fields in that file and unfortunately failed to change one of them back before being released.  I did notice this sometime back and fixed it, however.  Not that it's a huge deal.  As you pointed out, anyone can edit the file.

[adhawkins]

adhawkins: You don't need to go back and change the prizes to a "fixed" amount just to deal with this issue.  You can either (a) adjust the amount of one or more of the prizes (the "Adjust by" field takes a positive or negative amount); or (b) override the amount

That (changing them to a fixed amount) is what I've done.

I think it would probably be simpler to just keep taking an amount off the first prize (the amount of the rounding) until the prize total equals the prize fund.

Ok, this might not be exactly what everyone wants, but they'd still have the option of manually editing the prize fund once the rounding had been completed.

How does that sound?

Andy