The WDF. Hmm.

You know how I said the WDF had done a shitty job publicising the World Masters? Well, at least as far as me being able to see any of the publicity they did do? It didn't take much for me to see things when something didn't go quite to plan, as the situation and their attempts at managing the situation somewhat blew up social media the other day.

So basically it seems someone worked out they had fucked up one of the invite tables or something like that, and invited the wrong player to the women's event. As this was apparently noticed during the final qualifier itself, it was seemingly too late to do a switcheroo of the invites, which is quite obvious as the player you'd take out can't really join the qualifier that's already started. As such, what they've apparently done is bumped the field up to 25, by inviting both the player they should have done in the first place, and the one they did by mistake, and rather than having two spots, those players in the last chance saloon quali have an effective play in game, and they all get paid first round money whatever happens.

Which is fine and is making the best of a bad situation - only then that they seemingly deleted the explanation post and blocked X comments for future posts relating to the tournament. Which isn't exactly the way to own your mistakes. The question is how on earth this has happened in the first place. I don't even think this is a case of not being able to count to 24, something's got to have gone somewhat wrong somewhere. Frankly it needs two things doing.

First, it needs an overhaul (installation?) of their player management system. I have no idea what systems they have in place at present, but the first rule of anything IT related is garbage in, garbage out. If you limit the garbage in, then you've at least got a fighting chance. Create a very simple database in terms of what it holds. First name(s), surname, DOB, gender, country, email address. I don't think you need any more data at this point. That then spits out a player number as a unique key, you use that when you enter a WDF event, organisers of the individual event then have known good data that they can feed into Dart Connect or whatever. The main thing I'm trying to prevent here is data being fragmented. God knows how many times I've needed to check whether it's Dave or David Pallett, Matt or Matthew Edgar in my system, let alone situations where there's even more complication, like Martin Atkins, more or less anyone from Scandinavia, places like much of East Asia where it is normal to list the family name first (and seemingly Hungary based on two seconds of AI research as to whether Andras Borbely being listed the wrong way round in DC for the World Open was a fuck up), I still have no idea whether Jeff Springer and Jeff Springer Jr are distinct players, etc etc. I list the fields as I do to cover everything the WDF hosts - Paige Pauling could quite legitimately enter all the open youth, open girls, open and women's events on any given weekend if she wanted. Check eligibility by filtering. Have consistent data across all things you do. One database is better than four.

Second, it needs one solid way to handle submission of tournament results. Have some sort of portal where tournament organisers can submit what they are planning to host, that can then return confirmation of what WDF level event it will be, and once the event is done, present the number of rounds needed to allocate everyone their ranking points. Have this email the players at this stage confirmation of their finishing places, and it's then on the players to notify if there's been a mistake somewhere. Get that bit right, with a back end table that has something like player id - tournament id - tournament date - round reached, and you can then do everything else from there more or less automatically. Yearly ranking tables? Done. Regional ranking tables? Done. Race tables? Done. Handling players winning an auto Lakeside spot by winning a gold event? Easy to identify, easy to handle, just depends on the exact WDF rules as to how you do it. Exclusion of players from Lakeside race list that you know have accepted an Ally Pally invite? Can be done. The rolling rankings are just a one off job. Something like race to Lakeside is also a one off job, would just need a touch more work to handle all the exceptions - the point is that if you get the back end data right, then getting what you want out of it becomes a lot simpler, and I'm not convinced they're getting the back end data right. Fix that, and they've got half a chance of going two weeks without someone making BDO comparisions on X. 

My consultancy charges are very reasonable and can be paid in the currency of Lakeside tickets, just as an aside.