Amusement devices: games – Including means for processing electronic data – In a chance application
Reexamination Certificate
2000-09-06
2002-09-03
Harrison, Jessica (Department: 3713)
Amusement devices: games
Including means for processing electronic data
In a chance application
C463S029000, C700S093000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06443838
ABSTRACT:
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
Not Applicable
STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH OR DEVELOPMENT
Not Applicable
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to methods for defining the outcome of seeded tournament games and related endeavors, either in whole or in part, and particularly with respect to methods by which wagers may be placed on tournament or “round” outcomes without having the winner of any particular game become fully determinative of that defined outcome, thereby to preclude the “fixing” of any particular game so that “winning” bets could be made, i.e., within the method of the invention any “fixing” of the outcome is rendered virtually impossible.
2. Description of Related Art
It has been long practice for people who may or may not have any intrinsic interest in sports events nevertheless to engage in betting thereon, whether through clubs, betting parlors, or simple “office pools” or wagers with friends and neighbors and the like. Such wagering may encompass single games, or it may encompass ultimate winners in various rounds or in the entirety of various seeded tournaments, both amateur and professional, such as that of the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) in basketball (16 teams within each of four regions) or the National Football League (NFL) (6 teams in each Conference) However, a campaign further to prohibit betting or gambling in relation to both amateur (including Olympic) and professional sports is being undertaken, because of the tendency for there to occur at least two kinds of dishonest and corrupting practices in connection therewith, which are (a) the use of performance enhancing drugs; and (b) ties to organized crime and the possibility of “fixing” particular games so as to ensure being able to make a “winning” bet. Thus, in the U.S. Congress there has appeared H.R. 3575 (106
th
Congress, 2
nd
Session), the “Student Athletic Protection Act,” which would add to the existing 28 U.S.C. §§ 3701-3704 (Title 28, Ch. 178—Professional And Amateur Sports Protection) a provision that would more explicitly incorporate high school, college and Olympic games within those activities with respect to which gambling would be prohibited, and also adding gambling within States that had permitted such prior to 1991. Also, the NCAA has long waged a campaign to discourage gambling by student athletes, and for that purpose it publishes a brochure entitled “Don't Bet On It” that it posts at the web site http://www.ncaa.org/gambling/dontbetonit/. It is thus of interest to devise means not previously contemplated whereby the sports wagering that will inevitably occur may be isolated from the adverse influences noted, and as background for that purpose some description of tournament structure should be useful.
For purposes of the present invention, a “tournament” is defined as a sequence of two or more separate game plays between paired teams, occurring between at least two such pairs of teams, so as to yield two or more sequential outcomes that will ultimately lead to a winner of the tournament as a whole.
An “elimination tournament” is one in which individual teams or players that start out playing in a tournament are not allowed to proceed further in the tournament after having lost a predetermined number of games, which number is often 1, but may be 2 or more (e.g., as is often done in high school tournaments).
A “non-elimination tournament,” typically employed in golf, is one in which no players or teams are eliminated from further play but simply complete the tournament, or may be projected to do so, in an order of ranking based upon comparisons of actual of anticipated scores.
An “event” has the same structure as a non-elimination tournament but occurs all at once as, for example, a horse race or the like, and the horses (or dogs, etc.) are simply ranked in order of their anticipated and then actual order of finishing.
A “round” is one stage of an elimination tournament and is defined as an array of one or more individual games that are typically played either simultaneously or in reasonably near time proximity one to the other in the case of there being more than a single game within the round, in which the pairings of teams so playing against one another has been established by preset rules. Thus, in a “first round,” all or nearly all of the teams that will be playing in the tournament will have been “paired off” in some fashion, and then those teams that win their games in that first round will “advance” to the “second round.” A team would not have played in that first round if it had received a “bye,” by which is meant that based upon some set criteria, such a team will be allowed to play in the second round of the tournament without having had to play (and win) in the first round. (Such a process is mathematically necessary when the number of teams playing in the tournament is not a power of 2, as in the National Football League in which 12 teams compete.) The “final round” of the tournament represents the case in which the round consists of a single game, i.e., for the “championship.”
A “bye” is a circumstance relevant to an elimination tournament wherein some even numbers of teams or players are not required to play in a particular round, typically the first round, but proceed to a subsequent round automatically so as to join in that subsequent round with those teams or players that played in the given round and then “advanced” to the subsequent round.
Both individual rounds and tournaments as a whole, and both elimination or non-elimination, are designated herein as constituting an ensemble of games (As noted, an “event” is treated herein in the same manner as a non-elimination tournament.) Similar such ensembles are found, for example, in “day's games,” i.e., an array of some particular number of NFL games that would be played on a Sunday, or in some instances in the course of a season there would be fewer games; in others one or more pairs of teams would instead play on some week night to complete a “week's games,” and so on, but in any event there will be some defined ensemble of games to which the method of the invention will apply in same manner as it does to a single tournament round.
By “seeding” is meant the process by which a set of rules has been defined whereby the performance of each of the teams within a defined league during the course of a “regular season,” i.e., a previously defined game schedule for the year in which all of the teams in the league participate, determines whether or not each particular team will “make the playoffs,” i.e., will be permitted to participate in a “post-seasons” tournament for which there will also be defined a specific game schedule, and those teams so selected will then be “ranked” by some set of rules. Each team that “made the playoffs” is then “ranked” or “seeded” so that, in one method of seeding, the team being deemed the “best” in terms of a subjective “likelihood of winning” becomes the first seed, i.e., with a seed of “1,” and the remaining teams are then seeded similarly, in ascending order, so that the lowest rated team has the highest seed number. (Seeding might also be done alphabetically, e.g., as “A,” “B,” etc., but any such method is easily converted into to an equivalent numeric scale wherein, e.g., A=1, B=2, and so on.)
That process might instead depend more objectively on the number and distribution of games actually won and lost during the regular season, or have some other basis such as a “power rating.” By this latter process, which is often also subjective, teams may be rated in terms of games won and lost, and also by the “point spread” of the games, i.e., the number of points by which a game was won, but other data may also be considered, such as who is injured, who got traded with whom, the strength or “toughness” of each team's schedule, etc., and the seeding is then derived from that power rating.
In the case of “day's games,” as another example, an array of predicted point spr
Harrison Jessica
Hotaling, II John M
Weide & Miller Ltd.
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