Top Dog Handicap
Background
The Top Dog handicap tournament system was developed by Dean Bedlington of Olympian Games in Australia for DBM circa 2000 and later supported in David Young’s Glicko ratings for DBM. It provides a way to run a parallel tournament at a wargames event, awarding prizes based on each player-and-army combination playing against its historical competition record. It also aims to encourage army diversity by penalising commonly used armies and rewarding those that have seen little use.
These notes are based on David Young’s notes on the Top Dog system hosted on the NASAMW Glicko page.
The Top Dog handicap is not based on Glicko ratings, but uses the data collected for them. Handicaps are based on average score per game, calculated on a 0-to-25 basis for DBMM. This site publishes adjusted Top Dog values for each army and player.
Running a Top Dog Tournament
Run a normal competition with its usual scores and prizes. In addition, award the Top Dog prize to the player with the highest normal score minus their Top Dog handicap multiplied by the number of competition rounds. Normally, players who finish on the normal podium are excluded from winning the Top Dog event.
The total Top Dog handicap per round is two-thirds of the player Top Dog value plus one-third of the army Top Dog value.
If a player misses a round or receives a bye, that round’s score does not count for Top Dog.
Details
The player handicap is generally based on the player’s historical average points per game (P), with a discount for newer players:
| Rated games | Player handicap |
|---|---|
| 0 | 1.00 |
| 1 to 7 | max(1.00, P × 0.3333) |
| 8 to 15 | max(1.00, P × 0.6667) |
| 16 or more | P |
The army handicap is based on the army’s average score per game (A), with discounts for rarely used armies and penalties for heavily used armies:
| Games for army | Army handicap |
|---|---|
| 0 | 0.00 |
| 1 to 7 | A × 0.25 |
| 8 to 15 | A × 0.50 |
| 16 to 23 | A × 0.75 |
| 24 to 99 | A |
| 100 to 199 | A + 2 |
| 200 to 299 | A + 4 |
| 300 or more | A + 2 for each additional 100 games |
Penalties above 99 games were doubled to account for the change from 0-to-10 DBM scoring to 0-to-25 DBMM scoring.
Example
A player with 12 rated games and an average score of 4.50 who chooses an unused army has a player handicap of 4.50 × 0.6667 = 3.00 and an army handicap of 0.00. The combined per-round handicap is ⅔ × 3.00 + ⅓ × 0.00 = 2.00.
The Top Dog values published on this site include the adjustments for the number of games played.