Series List

Preliminaries

Tournament names, event names, and series names are of no significance for the rating. Therefore, initially, they went and lost. But because they often accompanied the tournament results and because I did not want to discard unrecoverable information, I began to save them as “comments” without semantics. This started in November 2000. Eventually, in May 2007, tournament names were introduced and I tried to recover them. In summary, tournament names are doubtful and must be reviewed.

Tournaments can be browsed by places and by series lists. Whereas browsing by places works out of the box and does not require any preparations, browsing by tournament series expects meaningful tournament names. The following text is for tournament organizers.

Creating a Brand

There are strong brands like World Championships, Nederlandse Kampioenschappen, Deutsche Meisterschaften, Чемпіонат України, Belgian Championship, Bergische Meisterschaften, Berliner Stadtmeisterschaft, … There are more, but the greatest among all of them is the group of the Provinciaale Kampioenschappen. If you are an organizer of one of the listed tournaments, enjoy and carry on with your brand.

First off: The tournaments are your babies and you are going to name them.

Selecting a tournament name is a decision for years. What parts make up a good tournament name?

Typical Parts of Tournament Names
ComponentRemarks
TypeExamples
Event Type Championship, Kampioenschap, Meisterschaften, Чемпіонат, Mesterskapet, Turnier, Championnat, Grand Prix, Cup What is the prize of the competition? It is almost redundant but is required like water in a soup. Alongside a place identifier it can be replaced by Open (like in London Open ) or by Stratego (like in Rheinisches Stratego ). But it can be a significant component (like Grand Prix for EGC tournaments).
Place Identifier Belgique, Norsk, України, Noord-Holland, Deutsche, auf dem Bauernhof, Münsterländer, Bergische, Рівного That’s what gives it that extra something. It has a high recognition factor.
Ordinals 3rd, , 1er, 15. This is not part of the brand, it is just an identification within the brand. Technically, is is stripped off to form a series name. Ordinals make it easy to distinguish and to sort tournaments within a series. Wouldn’t it be great to organize the 25th tournament of a series?
Player Domain Open, International, Åpent, Відкритий, Offene, жінок, Jeugd, women Often an event includes tournaments for various player classes. There might be a women competition or a junior competition alongside the senior competition. Therefore age and gender are not part of the series names. However, open, international, or national cannot be stripped off.
Sponsor / Organizer ISF, SBN, StraDeV, EGC, Schnuffel, Fahnenkiller, “Weg der Victorie”, De Verkenners, J.H.Fuhr, Jumbo He who pays the piper, calls the tune. But whereas organizers have long-term planning, sponsors must check their budget for every event. This makes sponsor names a bad choice if you plan to make a long series. E.g., two of the three (Ford → Rheinenergie, Karstadt → Vivawest) sponsor-named marathon events in the Rhineland region were renamed in the last decade.
Date 2005, Winter Year numbers are redundant. They are already part of the database.

Language

The English language has become the facto standard of communication, the practical realization of the Esperanto concept. Obviously, international tournaments should be named in English. That makes anglicisms trendy.

But is it required to translate a local brand name? Does translating Bergische Meisterschaften to Championships of the Land of Berg (even worse: to Mountainous Championships) make anything clearer? There had been political reasons (during World War Ⅰ) to translate the proper name Battenberg to Mountbatten but this was hundred years ago. ☺. We have made some progress since then.

Plural vs. Singular

Is it Championship or Championships? It is reasonable to let the answer depend on the number of competitions. If there is more than one prize ceremony then it is expedient to use the plural form regardless whether the competitions were performed in separate groups. E.g., at the Bergische Meisterschaften we often had not enough juniors to let them play in a separate field. But even when they played together with the seniors they fought a championship of their own.

Abbreviations

WM, NK, GP, WC, PK, NC, and DM. Got it? Sometimes abbreviations can be ambiguous: E.g., is NK Nationale Kampioenschappen or Nederlandse Kampioenschappen? And in the era of “Google Translate” abbreviations are still a good means of obfuscation. Uaiamot (meaning: “Using abbreviations is a matter of taste.”).

Technical Considerations

Significance

Tournament series are listed in order of their significance, most significant series come first. A series gains significance by pointing to another tournament. I.e., an event with juniors and seniors playing in separated groups count two tournaments whereas an event with a combined group just counts as a single tournament. By the date of writing —when series names were introduced— the top dozen series were

Significance of Series on 2015-09-29.
Series NameSignificance
World Championships 44
Provinciaal Kampioenschap Noord-Brabant35
Nederlandse Kampioenschappen 29
Bergische Meisterschaften 26
Provinciaal Kampioenschap Gelderland 25
Deutsche Meisterschaften 22
Provinciaal Kampioenschap Utrecht 18
Berliner Stadtmeisterschaft 16
Provinciaal Kampioenschap Limburg 14
Provinciaal Kampioenschap Zuid-Holland 13
Чемпіонат України з гри Стратего 12
Belgian Championship 11

Tournament Names

The database contains neither event names nor series names. Tournament names, e.g. 4. Bergische Meisterschaften, Junioren are the only items included. Technically, they name cross tables.

Event Names

An event can have more than one tournament. In the given example there had been a senior group named 4. Bergische Meisterschaften, Senioren. The event names are derived from the tournament names by stripping off the first comma and everything that follows it. In the example the event name reads 4. Bergische Meisterschaften. The rule makes the namings of tournaments somehow inflexible but it has the advantage to be clear. And everything can be written following the comma.

So far for the easy case. On 2009-10-10 there were two tournaments in Breda: Breda Open and Nederlandse Kampioenschappen, Jeugd. According to the rules given, these tournaments map to two event names: Breda Open and Nederlandse Kampioenschappen. That way the event appears in two series.

Series Names

Acknowledgments

Credit goes to Loris Collart for valuable discussions.

                       

Best viewed with any standard conformant XHTML-browser.

Your browser is outdated and does not accept XHTML.

stopsoftwarepatents.eu petition banner