WBC is Coming and so is the Inaugural Organized Play Champion

Current Organized Play Rankings

The final event for the first CFR Organized Play season is coming.  Although the biggest news may be that I've made a mid-season change to how the rankings are scored.

The In-Person Bonus
I've been noticing this year that online races and especially online tournaments have a scoring advantage over in-person races.  Online tournaments can more easily accommodate larger numbers of participants and ladder-style series concentrate higher ranked players into the same races, making those races more valuable.

I love online tournaments and races.  But I don't want in-person to be devalued.  So, I'm now adding an in-person bonus to the Average Field Rating to create AFR+.  For this season, the in-person bonus is + 0.18 for in-person races and +0.33 for in-person tournaments.

How did I come up with those numbers?  I measured the difference in field ratings between the best and median in-person and online races and series over the last 2 years.  Then I added 0.10 to that difference in favor of in-person.

I've added AFR+ to the race and tournament reports -- which have been updated through PrezCon Summer and sorted by AFR+.  I've also updated everyone's rankings based on this change plus data from PrezCon Summer.

Obviously, this change in scoring will help those who have participated and done well in live races -- mainly the two PrezCons.  Don managed to leap-frog over Fabio into 4th as his win at PrezCon Winter was given more weight.  Brian DeWitt moved into 7th after winning PrezCon Summer.  That said, the three most valuable race wins were online and both online tournaments were worth much more than the two in-person events so far in 2017.

WBC
And that brings us back to WBC.  In the past this has been the largest gathering of CFR players in the world every year.  And it remains the largest in-person gathering although my online tournament has drawn more participants the last couple of iterations.

With the new in-person bonus, ut will be interesting to see what weight WBC ends up with.  If WBC pulls in significantly more people than we've seen in past years, anything could happen.  But as it stands now, Doug Galullo is still the driver with the best shot to un-seat me atop the CFR Organized Play rankings.

More information about CFR at the World Boardgaming Championships.