Quote:
Originally Posted by RoundTower
is this true? The only thing I could be confident of saying there is the number of BLACK wins should go up when the players are lower rated. In the actual tournament, there were 40% wins for White, but that is skewed by some players being up to 383 points higher rated than their opponents and a correspondingly lower draw percentage than for a matchup between the top players.
I don't think it's obvious either way, I think the decision to take the bye depends on who your first-round opponent would be. Who would it have been?
I agree that it's not obvious which was the point of the system. I think it's extremely close. His first round opponent probably would have been Sam Shankland, because it would have fallen to Parker Zhao who would have probably taken the bye?
Also if you play the first round game, you are guaranteed to have to face Shankland at some point (and he is clearly the better player), however if you take the bye, there is a reasonable chance you will just have to win one game against Parker Zhao.
I'm pretty sure that in Robson's shoes I'd take the bye and I don't think it's that close. By that I mean I can't imagine it's ever going to be under 33.3% and that the advantage of maybe getting to play only the weakest player of the two, getting to play someone who just got finished a possibly tiring game, and getting to face someone who is playing a game that starts 4-5 hours than the normal round time and thus might be tired, could ever not be worth it. I mean basically everything falls in favor of taking the bye. It's just that once you play that one game, you are usually a decided underdog, which is only fair.