2023 NHK Trophy Free Dance - Hello Rocky

[tony]

So then we should compare GOEs and PCS (Which I think is what TG was saying but I wasn't sure). OTOH, GOEs can be impacted by the levels/rotations even if they aren't supposed to be in theory. I do think

How? The judges don’t know the levels called.

Rotations, yes. But that’s the big issue with rotations/takeoff edges and the technical panel when it comes to singles skating. The judges see that a jump gets e instead of !, the base value goes way down, and their GOE has to sink down into the negatives when they initially had +3 or +4. That’s a huge loss of points.

Uno’s 4Lo that was very much < at Worlds would have docked his base value and GOE enough that I think he would have lost the gold medal. But instead, no call and massive GOE. Sakamoto’s Lutz, same deal.

 

[kwanfan1818]

How? The judges don’t know the levels called.

If they’re competent, they’d have a good guess. I know they stopped flashing levels at the judges, because they’d up GOE based on difficulty, but that doesn’t stop their impressions of difficulty, even if they don’t get the finer point in real time of a spin being 7.5 vs. 8 rotations, for example.

 

[MacMadame]

How? The judges don’t know the levels called.

If they’re competent, they’d have a good guess.

Yep. I mean I can guess the levels and be right 90% of the time and I haven't studied the rules as much as a judge would have (or even as much as Tony. I bet he guesses right 99% of the time).

I think it's just human nature to judge something that looks hard more favorably than something that looks easy. Good judges train themselves out of this and succeed most of the time. But judges are humans and have their own biases and aren't perfect.

All of which is a way to say that GOE is messy.

 

[tony]

If they’re competent, they’d have a good guess. I know they stopped flashing levels at the judges, because they’d up GOE based on difficulty, but that doesn’t stop their impressions of difficulty, even if they don’t get the finer point in real time of a spin being 7.5 vs. 8 rotations, for example.

Yep. I mean I can guess the levels and be right 90% of the time and I haven't studied the rules as much as a judge would have (or even as much as Tony. I bet he guesses right 99% of the time).

I think it's just human nature to judge something that looks hard more favorably than something that looks easy. Good judges train themselves out of this and succeed most of the time. But judges are humans and have their own biases and aren't perfect.

All of which is a way to say that GOE is messy.

I simply do not agree, especially when it comes to ice dance. There is no 'looking harder' when it comes to elements like the one-foot sequence because all of the teams can do the four turns on a given day. It's just putting them all together, starting at exactly the same time, and getting clean edges throughout to get the highest level- which almost all teams never do, regardless of how 'good' it looks. On top of that, the skaters don't even have to do the turns in the same order past the first one, so unless the judges go back and watch this entire thing in slo-mo for every single team, there's no way anyone can tell me they have any idea what level is going to be called for each partner. I also highly doubt the judges are watching each and every turn and edge in the singles skaters' step sequences.

The choreographic elements aren't even scored on difficulty most of the time-- but rather start order, audience reaction, and world ranking seem to have everything to do with it.

I guess wrong plenty of times because technical panels aren't doing their jobs. It's not a case of 'well the camera was bad' as I ranted about someplace else; they simply just don't want to start calling what is clearly visible even in real-time. Shoma was complaining about his calls, which I was even surprised about, after years and years and years of not doing a proper 4F yet always receiving massive credit for it.

 

[Jarrett]

Have the usual arm chair judges ever judged a competition side by side with an isu panel so we can see how they justify their marks and how different they are? Maybe you all can do that for the gpf because this bemoaning in EVERY ice dance doesn’t seems to be very productive in getting your point across. Saying chock and bates sometimes gets higher goe than they deserve WITHOUT indicating exactly why they don’t deserve that GOE would be useful and helpful. What bullets do did you think they missed? What bullets did the other teams miss? I’m very interested in understanding others point of view but I need actual detail to do it not just generalizations.

 

[tony]

Have the usual arm chair judges ever judged a competition side by side with an isu panel so we can see how they justify their marks and how different they are? Maybe you all can do that for the gpf because this bemoaning in EVERY ice dance doesn’t seems to be very productive in getting your point across. Saying chock and bates sometimes gets higher goe than they deserve WITHOUT indicating exactly why they don’t deserve that GOE would be useful and helpful. What bullets do did you think they missed? What bullets did the other teams miss? I’m very interested in understanding others point of view but I need actual detail to do it not just generalizations.

I've done this for years and years, sometimes even line by line, going through each criteria. I used to even score competitions in real-time, calling my own levels and assigning my own GOE on my blog. I ask others constantly to quantify their opinions when they say 'well that deserved 70 points overall' or whatever else (recently 'blasting rock music' or whatever it was as a reason to not give Kagiyama PCS points), and I constantly troll the ice dance hall thread when people make declarations that show they don't know the first thing about any rules.

The ice dance handbook is very, very complex and most people aren't going to be able to judge levels accurately unless they are literally sitting there only watching the skates the entire time, which most people don't watch skating for. Even then, sometimes the camera crews like to only show us the upper bodies and/or the view from 50 miles away.

 

[marbri]

https://twitter.com/Ben_Agosto/status/1728874941259649334

Just leaving that here for those who enjoy and may have missed Ben's tweets for this competition.

 

[skatingguy]

I guess wrong plenty of times because technical panels aren't doing their jobs. It's not a case of 'well the camera was bad' as I ranted about someplace else; they simply just don't want to start calling what is clearly visible even in real-time. Shoma was complaining about his calls, which I was even surprised about, after years and years and years of not doing a proper 4F yet always receiving massive credit for it.

I was surprised to see the q on all four quadruple jumps that Shoma rotated because watching the program the jumps didn't look any different then they did in the past, and then we got the full e on Sakamoto's Lutz last week, and again not any different than usual. I don't know if that's a change in the caller, or something was said about the lack of calls earlier in the Grand Prix series.

 

[kwanfan1818]

I also highly doubt the judges are watching each and every turn and edge in the singles skaters' step sequences.

No, but I'm pretty sure they at least think they have an idea/impression of how difficult something is, and the ISU decided that they didn't want to disclose levels, because judges would give higher marks the higher the difficulty. While that bias might be less, the impression is either there or not.

I haven't gone through the protocols to see if at least two of the choreo elements in Dance are consistently placed at the end so that, like in singles, they attempt to get a big response from the audience appeal of their elements, while, until then, they are trying to hit all of the levels. I know that when they were limited to one and to footwork, they came at the end, so that there was no danger of being called as a leveled element.

 

[MacMadame]

The choreographic elements aren't even scored on difficulty most of the time-- but rather start order, audience reaction, and world ranking seem to have everything to do with it.

They all are level 1 (i.e., no levels) so I'm not sure why you brought them up in a discussion of how levels impact GOE.

The ice dance handbook is very, very complex and most people aren't going to be able to judge levels accurately unless they are literally sitting there only watching the skates the entire time, which most people don't watch skating for. Even then, sometimes the camera crews like to only show us the upper bodies and/or the view from 50 miles away.

You don't need to know all the rules. That's my point. If you watch enough, you get a sense of what the levels will be. It's mostly intuition with a smattering of understanding the rules.

 

[kwanfan1818]

They all are level 1 (i.e., no levels) so I'm not sure why you brought them up in a discussion of how levels impact GOE.

Not tony, but if the judging for choreographic elements is tied to something other than difficulty, than either the judges are separating difficulty from the choreo elements and not allowing a bias for difficulty impact the GOE, or, if not, this would show that the tie between perception of difficulty and high GOE marks has been at least tamed across-the-board.

The easiest call-out for people in the arena is when high marks are given to teams who are slow and have little ice coverage, compared to others, including some in the early group(s), who have speed and great ice coverage without sacrificing musicality. Or when the patterns were noticeably shallower for higher-ranked and later teams, but got equal or better marks, before they were removed from Sr. RD's.

 

[Theatregirl1122]

So then we should compare GOEs and PCS (Which I think is what TG was saying but I wasn't sure). OTOH, GOEs can be impacted by the levels/rotations even if they aren't supposed to be in theory. I do think

What I'm saying is that you can straight up compare the PCS if you were trying to see how the judges "ranked" the skater, but if you just look at the GOE to see how they "ranked" the skaters in the TES, you will get a misleading picture because skaters who have lower levels will get lower points based on GOE, sometimes even if the judges gave them higher GOE, which I think is the point that the person who SHARPIE contacted was trying to make. If we want to see how the judges "ranked" based on GOE, we should be looking at their raw GOE values, not the points that the GOE values turn into.

How? The judges don’t know the levels called.

Right, I think that's the point?

 

[beckab81]

I was surprised to see the q on all four quadruple jumps that Shoma rotated because watching the program the jumps didn't look any different then they did in the past, and then we got the full e on Sakamoto's Lutz last week, and again not any different than usual. I don't know if that's a change in the caller, or something was said about the lack of calls earlier in the Grand Prix series.

There was a good discussion about this in "The Runthrough" last week. Adam gave the example of being at a GP and being told the tech panel wasn't going to credit his step sequence even though he hadn't had issues in prior competitions (he re-worked part of it to ensure he'd get credit). The thought was that some callers wanted to make a point about things they had noticed earlier in the season and were surprised weren't called, or show how tough or exceptional they are (I recommend listening to their actual words, not my poor recap ).

 

[Tak]

Have the usual arm chair judges ever judged a competition side by side with an isu panel so we can see how they justify their marks and how different they are? Maybe you all can do that for the gpf because this bemoaning in EVERY ice dance doesn’t seems to be very productive in getting your point across. Saying chock and bates sometimes gets higher goe than they deserve WITHOUT indicating exactly why they don’t deserve that GOE would be useful and helpful. What bullets do did you think they missed? What bullets did the other teams miss? I’m very interested in understanding others point of view but I need actual detail to do it not just generalizations.

I get what you're saying, but honestly, it's very difficult for someone watching on TV to judge levels in ice dance correctly - so much of it comes from seeing exact edges used clearly. You need to see the feet close up and clearly, preferably in slow motion. On TV the picture jerks from one camera to another very frequently, include a lot of "far" shots and often don't show the feet at all. You have a better chance if you are sitting in the arena somewhere close to the rink.

 

[MacMadame]

What I'm saying is that you can straight up compare the PCS if you were trying to see how the judges "ranked" the skater, but if you just look at the GOE to see how they "ranked" the skaters in the TES, you will get a misleading picture because skaters who have lower levels will get lower points based on GOE, sometimes even if the judges gave them higher GOE, which I think is the point that the person who SHARPIE contacted was trying to make. If we want to see how the judges "ranked" based on GOE, we should be looking at their raw GOE values, not the points that the GOE values turn into.

I don't think we're disagreeing. Just saying that maybe GOE could tell us something but there are reasons it's not as reliable as PCS are.

 

[Jarrett]

I've done this for years and years, sometimes even line by line, going through each criteria. I used to even score competitions in real-time, calling my own levels and assigning my own GOE on my blog. I ask others constantly to quantify their opinions when they say 'well that deserved 70 points overall' or whatever else (recently 'blasting rock music' or whatever it was as a reason to not give Kagiyama PCS points), and I constantly troll the ice dance hall thread when people make declarations that show they don't know the first thing about any rules.

The ice dance handbook is very, very complex and most people aren't going to be able to judge levels accurately unless they are literally sitting there only watching the skates the entire time, which most people don't watch skating for. Even then, sometimes the camera crews like to only show us the upper bodies and/or the view from 50 miles away.

What blog? That would be helpful to see so I can see what you have done. I am asking this because I am genuinely interested in ice dance at this point. Before in the 90s and 00s, I would be bored out of my mind watching a dance competition but now it is the highlight of the event from start to finish. Whenever people are saying that everyone from Montreal is skating the same way I don't see that or whatever they are talking about and it just comes off as bias that their favorites aren't winning. I do see some steps being reused by teams to fulfill the levels (I assume) but that goes for almost all of the teams.

 

[sk9tingfan]

The start of a comeback for Papadakis and Cizeron?

https://twitter.com/paul_peret/status/1729534650635149575

 

[Wyliefan]

The start of a comeback for Papadakis and Cizeron?

https://twitter.com/paul_peret/status/1729534650635149575

That should probably go in the Dance Hall thread in the Trash Can.