Is tournament X for you?

Phil Watanabe and I were talking in between games at the UPA championships. The topic was which tournaments our teams were playing at and whether they had value for our teams. We sort of came up with a simple starting model to analyze the value of a tournament for your team.

Pictured Above: An attempted foot block by Shawn Chua against a Van Buren Boy (photo courtesy of Lisa Di Diodato).

The parameters that are relevant to the analysis are:

• C - Competition - For competition, if possible, take all the teams who are playing in the tournament (or those that would be in your division) and average their RRI. You could use your own teams RRI to normalize this value or just compare your RRI against the average.
  
• C$ - Cost - the average cost of the tournament for an individual including lost opportunity costs.
  
• Tourney + food + accommodation + travel
  
• Lost time at work

Then if you divide C by C$ it will give you a competition to cost ratio on a per person basis. Given two or more tournaments you can then simply compare the competition to cost ratio and that will tell you, which tournament might be a better choice.

This simple equation misses many of the factors that you might want to consider when you're choosing a tournament (and possibly you don't even care about cost). Some of the factors are travel time, amenities at the tournament, playing against regional competition, and potential for prizes, prize money, and glory.

At least this equation is a starting point for the analysis.

PJ