There are two major drivers of your playing outcome:
(1) the quality of the competition, so seating the players in even brackets would be priority one;
(2) the country you get, depending on the scoring method.
Obviously playing just one game can give a "lucky" result (i.e. I got an Austria solo - doesn't get luckier than that!), so the more games the better.
On the country you get, though, that needs to be evened out. If the average result is 2
with Turkey and 1 point for Austria, than a below average player who gets 1.5
with Turkey will beat an above average player who gets 1.4
with Austria.
I took the data from http://www.draugnar.com/VaftStats/openings/gunboats.html excluding CDs and weighting wins by 13
and draws by a reasonable 3
and you can see getting 3 Austrias is a significant handicap versus 3 Turkeys on average.
(sorry, wasn't sure how to make it more readable...)
Average Played Won % Drawn % Survived % Defeated %
1.54 England 781 51 7% 179 23% 228 29% 323 41%
2.36 France 772 88 11% 227 29% 270 35% 187 24%
1.45 Italy 760 46 6% 168 22% 278 37% 268 35%
2.15 Germany 761 82 11% 190 25% 227 30% 262 34%
1.26 Austria 740 41 6% 132 18% 121 16% 446 60%
1.48 Russia 723 52 7% 132 18% 204 28% 335 46%
2.59 Turkey 738 102 14% 196 27% 239 32% 201 27%
If we all had one of each, we would have a reasonable benchmark of 13
on average to be judged against...
GUNBOAT TOURNAMENT
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