[HPforGrownups] Re: The trouble with Quidditch

[Shaun Hately]

No: HPFGUIDX 168959

On 18 May 2007 at 0:00, Bart Lidofsky wrote:

> Bart:
> That was really my major point, and why I couldn't come up with a
> playable Quidditch game (once again, if the Snitch scored 50 instead
> of 150 points, the games would be played more or less the way JKR
> describes it). 

Shaun:

Something that may have been missed in considering the scoring of Quidditch, and whether 
or not 150 points is appropriate for the Snitch or not is that the vast majority of Quidditch 
games we have seen are school games. The scoring patterns that are seen in school games 
may have very little to do with the scoring patterns seen in competitive Quidditch.

I'll use cricket as an example, and two sources of figures I have available. You don't really 
need to understand cricket to understand the example.

The first set of figure - competitive cricket at world standard. Cricket has just recently had a 
world cup. There were 51 matches and I am just crunching the numbers for the winning 
score in each match giving 102 scores.

The average (mean) of those 102 scores is 209. The lowest score was 77, the highest 413.

That is competitive cricket.

The second set of scores I will look at come from school level cricket. They are actually the 
results for all matches my school played in 1989 - I'm using them because they are 
conveniently to hand in my school annual for that year. This is a high quality school level 
league - not necessarily the best school level league but indicative of a good standard of 
school level cricket. This time there were 60 matches, giving 120 scores.

The average (mean) of those 120 scores is 118. The lowest score was 17, the highest 235.

There's a significant difference in the type of scores you see in a competitive adult league 
and the type of scores you see at school level. The game is played by the same rules, and 
scored the same way but the scores are quite different.

Perhaps it is similar in Quidditch - perhaps the scores in an adult level game, a competition 
level game are quite different from those seen in house games at Hogwarts. Maybe in those 
games, 150 points for the Snitch makes a lot more sense.

We can't tell - as far as I know, we know only one score from top class Quidditch, and that's 
not a lot to go on. But we see a match that seems to be a lot faster scoring that the Hogwarts 
matches - goals may be a lot more common at higher levels than schools. And what of the 
Quidditch matches we hear off that went on for weeks before the snitch was caught - how 
many goals were scored in those matches, so how much effect did the snitch have when it 
was finally caught?

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200 
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
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facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be 
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