OddThinking

Introduction

The Passing Challenge is a competition for club-passing jugglers that has been held intermittently at the Melbourne and Sydney Juggling conventions for a few years.

It continues to evolve, but is starting to get interest from other conventions. This post documents the rules so that they may be freely re-used by others.

History

Initial Form

Mark D. introduced it in its basic form with some simple rules.

A big grid was drawn on a giant sheet of butcher’s paper. The columns were marked with the name of a standard two-person passing pattern, and a number of cycles. The first column had space for the names of two people.

Competitors would choose a partner, and throughout the convention, attempt to perform each of the juggling patterns, ticking them off as they went.

The team with the most number of ticks at the end of the competition won.

Complexification

While I enjoyed participating in the original competition, I felt it encouraged the wrong behaviour. To maximise their score, competitors tended to choose their regular passing partners, from their own home town, and would go off into a corner to earn points in solitude.

With Mark’s permission and with some trepidation that I was taking a simple system and making it overly complicated, I modified the competition, and have run it, in its new form, in the 2009 and 2010 Sydney Juggling Conventions.

In the new competition, each individual passer gets a separate sheet of A4 paper. It contains a grid, much like before, where passing patterns are listed across the top. The first column now has room for the names – each row represents one of your (multiple) passing partners.

Now, you get a point for each person that you manage to pass a pattern with. You can either aim to get a lot of patterns with one person, one pattern with lots of people, or somewhere in between.

I tried to weight the two tactics to properly reward both skillfulness and sociability; I didn’t want either tactic to dominate the competition.

To achieve this, I further complicated the rules, despite some misgivings.

I classified the patterns as Basic, Intermediate and Advanced, and gave more points for more difficult tricks.

I rewarded sociability, by giving a “sociability bonus” for each juggler that you passed with. (The other juggler need not enter, or even be aware, of the competition.)

I rewarded general skillfulness, by giving “diversity bonus” points for each different pattern that you achieved at least once.

I also introduced a special “unique skills” bonus, that was rewarded for being able to do a pattern that no-one else could do without you. For example, if Alice passes a 7-Club 3-count pattern with Bob, and again with Charlie, but Bob and Charlie do not manage that pattern with each other, and no-one else can manage it all, then Alice receives the “unique skill” bonus – effectively, if you removed her from the pool, no-one would have achieved that pattern.

To explain these rules, I had one sheet of paper pinned to the wall, describing the rules, one sheet of paper pinned to the wall listing the pattern names, their descriptions and their qualifying length, and one score sheet per competitor.

Mark’s original rules required a very long run of a pattern to qualify. It was a very high standard – pretty much that you could do the pattern with enough stability to perform in front of an audience. This made the difficult patterns very hard to achieve. It made the simple patterns a little boring to achieve. I reduced the length of the runs, generally by as much as 50%. This was more palatable to the amateur jugglers, who wanted a sense of achievement and to move onto the next pattern more quickly.

Prizes

Previously, there was no prize for winning. This year, there was a nominal prize for first and second (purchased for $2 each).

Results

Complexity

All these rules sound complicated. I was worried that it would be unintelligible to the jugglers, so I tried to make the forms clear. In particular, the jugglers don’t need to worry about how the score works – they can just tick the boxes, and the judges can take care of the rest. In practice, the participants seemed to quickly pick up how the rules worked, and what they needed to do to maximise their scores.

These rules do make the judging harder; there is a lot of arithmetic and it takes 15-30 minutes of paperwork to determine who won.

Weightings

I had expected it to take a couple of runs through the competition to tweak the ratings, but I managed to get it right the first time.

In the first competition, David H. slaved through the difficult patterns with a small number of very skilled partners. I took the opposite tactics – I started out getting the basic and intermediate patterns with some skilled partners, but rather than grinding against the advanced patterns, trying again and again to qualify, I started working the room during the last couple of hours of the competition. I buttonholed jugglers, and persuaded them to juggle one pattern with me (2-count, which isn’t the easiest possible pattern but takes only half as long to qualify as 4-count, which is the easiest pattern.) Once we qualified, I thanked them and quickly moved onto the next juggler.

When I added up the scores, David’s tactic did better – by one point! He beat me by 183 to 182, if I recall correctly.

In the second competition, neither David nor I took part (except to pass with other jugglers who did). Adrian took the slog approach, managing to achieve every single pattern with one other very-skilled passer, before moving onto to the next very-skilled passer. Ned, took an intermediate approach, achieving all but a few patterns, but then working with several different intermediate passers, and managing several patterns. Angela worked the room, over-filling the sheet after passing with 27 different individuals. Unfortunately, for Angela, it wasn’t enough. Ned beat Adrian by 337 to 335.

With scores this close, I don’t think the weightings could be more perfect.

Participation

This year, the buzz from the competition was greater than ever; I don’t know why. Despite that, only half-a-dozen sheets were submitted, which was less than last time; I don’t know why.

Many highly-skilled passers were participating informally (including the me) by partnering with (several of) the competitors. I had positive feedback from several of them (described further, below). I think they were happy to get the social interaction of the competition, but they didn’t have the time during the convention to devote themselves to it, in order to become competitive.

Feedback

One non-participant was impressed that there was an advanced pattern on the sheet he had never tried, and was happy to learn. This suggests there might be room to drop some of the standards and replace them with less well-known patterns of equivalent difficulty.

Another non-participant said she appreciated the structure of the interactions; less time was spent debating what was a good pattern to try, and more time spent juggling. (I note that this is a particular barrier at a juggling convention, where you are unsure of your partner’s skill level.)

I notice that, by the end of the conventions, I am ravenous to try some new patterns – ones that aren’t on the sheet!

Some particular patterns get particular mention:

1. Count Down From 4 – Last year this was Count Down From 3, but the day before this year’s convention I was juggling it and noticed for the first time, it was asymmetric and did not cycle evenly. (I had assumed it did, and never stopped to check.) It was hastily changed (thanks Angela!) to Count Down From 4. On the surface, it still appears to be an intermediate pattern, but it was causing more difficulty than several advanced patterns. Was it because no-one had tried it before? Because it was now an endurance pattern (Count Down From 3 requires 32 beats to qualify. Count Down From 4 requires 60.) Because it was no longer a muscle-memory pattern, but required keeping track of progress mentally? I am not sure, but it may need to be simplified or moved to the advanced list next time.
2. 7-Club 6-Count Popcorn – Popcorns are not my area of expertise. (I need to work on my hefs.) Apparently, there are two patterns that fit this description. The name should be clarified.
3. Mild Madness – There is some dispute about the official name. Is it called Martin’s Madness? I think I looked it up before using it originally, but I need to double-check.
4. 3-3-10 – This is clearly not the standard pattern I thought it was. I had many questions from experienced passers about how to do it, and reports that different pairs were doing it different ways. Probably could replace it with a more interesting pattern if it isn’t a standard one.
5. Tick-Tock, Don’t Stop – This is another pattern that seems to be a standard in some places and not others. I don’t do it regularly, and found it much more trouble than I remembered, making me suspect I have described it wrong (particularly, the last round of PPS). I need to double-check how it is done.

After the first year, people complained about having to resort back to the explanatory sheet pinned to the wall to find out how long each pattern had to be, so I put that information on the score sheet. After the second year, it was suggested that the back of the score sheet should have a copy of the pattern descriptions, which I think is an excellent idea, even if it increases the photocopying costs.

It was suggested this year that even more advanced patterns be added. I am in two minds about this. I don’t want to bias back towards the original problem of having the top passers pairing up for the entire convention.

Also, there is a practical issue that the score sheet is already fairly full, and the people I spoke to didn’t seem to want to remove any of the advanced patterns there. I am loathe to reduce the number of basic patterns, because I want beginners to feel able to start the challenge, even if they aren’t competitive.

The ideal selection of patterns should be a good sample of the different types of passing, not an exhaustive list. It should also be discriminating – if there is a pattern that no-one could achieve (or equally, that anyone could achieve), it doesn’t help separate the better passers from the chaff. This year, only one competitor was able to achieve all of the patterns (and thus earnt one Unique Skills bonus), which suggests to me the mix is pretty good right now (for the skill levels found at an Australian convention).

It was suggested this year that multi-person passing patterns be added. I really do like this idea, although has some practical issues to be worked out. Do people get points for each position (e.g. feeder and feedee) in the pattern? Do I only include patterns that treat each person equally? If Alice does a three person pattern with Bob and Charlie, and then the same pattern with Bob and Dianne, does that count for more points? Again, the already full score sheet may prove to be a problem. Perhaps a multi-person pattern challenge should be a separate competition.

It was suggested that bonus points be awarded for teaching a pattern to a partner who hasn’t done it before. I like the idea; it is encouraging the behaviour we want to see at a convention, and I would be happy to make the bonus quite large to be commensurate with the time taken. However, I can’t see how it would work practically. Compare the time taken to teach 3-3-10 to an experienced passer who has simply never heard of it to the time taken to teach 4-count to an beginner club-juggler. How about someone who can’t remember if they have done a particular pattern before or someone who has tried a pattern, and got close, but never made a run long enough to qualify? How could we award the points fairly?

It was suggested that there should be a “combo bonus” for transitions. If you seamlessly move from 4-count to 2-count to 3-count to PPS, qualifying each one, that should be worth more. Again, I haven’t worked out the practical implications here.

There is certainly room to bump up the value of the prizes; a bit more buzz around the competition, and the vendors may be willing to donate something of more value than $2.

The Files

Here are the files that I used.

• Rules and Patterns Word ’97 Doc, PDF
• Score Sheet Excel ’97 Doc, PDF

  They are freely available for other people to adapt and use without restriction, but I would love to hear about the changes you make, so I can fold the best ones back into our competition.

  All files are designed to look good in A4. If your country doesn’t use ISO standard paper sizes, please reconfigure your country’s preferred settings so they do 🙂