The CA tournament regulations contain precise rules for dealing with All-Play-All (American) Block Events. This however is for individuals rather than teams. Teams can draw and may be of different sizes. The methods used by the NW and SW federations have been studied. The solution we will adopt is along the lines of that explained in Appendix 4 of the CA tournament regulations.
If there are two teams with most points then a draw tells us nothing but a win gives an easy and appealing solution.
If there are three teams with most points (A, B and C) then if A beats B (written here as A>B) and A>C then it seems fair that A should be the winner regardless of the result of the B vs C match. So here A has won two of the matches played between A, B and C whereas B and C have either drawn or one of them has won one game. This leads to the simple solution of giving A 2 points for each of its wins (4 points in total) whereas B and C have two points between them. In other words the league is rescored considering just the matches played by the teams in contention. This works for any number of teams in contention and is likely to reduce the number of teams in contention so that the procedure can be repeated if necessary.
Unfortunately it is possible that each team wins one match giving all teams two points and so no progress in determining the winner.
To discriminate further need to look at individual games and then at hoops. Hoop count is consider to be a poor measure at AC so it is left to the end. Winning a match 4-0 however is better than winning 3-1. So if all matches had the same number of games one could simply add the net scores so that the two matches above would contribute 4 and 2 respectively. However if a match was played with only 3 games then winning 3-0 is almost as good as winning 4-0 so we divide by the total games expected in the match. This means that each match contributes between +1 and -1 to the total. It is also quite an interesting number to display during the season as it is meaningful before a team has played all its matches.
If we have to calculate net hoops then again these are divided by the expected number of games for each match to avoid favouring large teams.
It is possible that this will not lead to a winner. One obvious case is three teams all of which have played two game matches and each has won just one match 26-0, 26-0. It seems best to just accept that a draw is possible and that if a winner is needed to allow a club to take part in a CA event then just draw lots.
So in summary we have
- Most match points
- Most scaled net games
- Most scaled net hoops
where each time the field is reduced start again from the top.