I see it as my mission in life to improve all games and sports. I am not a massive fan of sport, but I like rules and as I am dispassionate I think I am the perfect person to point out where a popular and established sport is flawed. I recently suggested a way to improve football which essentially boils down to removing the goals and giving out points for other stuff. Hopefully that will be implemented by the next World Cup. No need to thank me. Just trying to make things fairer.
I was following the tennis today via Twitter and occasionally if it got exciting by using my data allowance to watch it on the BBC website (I was in my London home and we have no internet there at the moment).
I do like tennis, but the scoring is all to cock. You could win the vast majority of points and games and yet still lose (if you lost 0-6 0-6 7-6 7-6 7-5 and won all your games to love and lost the others by just two points), but that's part of the fun. What seemed less fair today was the very real possibility that all the sets might go to tie-breakers and one player might go through to the semi-final 7-6, 7-6, 7-6 winning each tie break 7-5 and thus only being six points better than the other.
Surely they should institute a policy where if you play two sets in a row that go to 6-6 then whoever didn't win the first tie-break wins the second set automatically? Because you've shown over the course of 24 games that you are equal.
Wouldn't it be better just to do away with all the stupid points, deuces, games and sets and just play for an hour and the sound a buzzer and whoever has scored the most points wins? Or if you want to keep the stupid points and games - if it gets to 6-6 then whoever won the most points in those 12 games wins the set? And if they have the same points then the set is decided by whoever can hit a tennis ball highest into the air? Or the umpire just decides which player has played the best shot?
Or they just play 3 points in the whole match and whoever wins 2 is the winner? Come on Ian Wimbledon, sort it out!
I had lots of ideas that I expounded on Twitter and enjoyed having people telling me why that wouldn't work. But then Andy Murray started winning on his own without my help, so none of my ideas mattered any more.
Whilst I am on a roll (pun not intended) can I add that I think the Yahtzee scoring rules should be adjusted, so that you score more points for each opportunity if you use less throws of the dice. So if you score a Yahtzee on the first roll you get 70 points, 60 on the second roll and 50 on the third. Come on Ian Yahtzee, sort it out!
Tonight I got a little taster of next month's Fringe as I played the venue that I will be playing in Edinburgh. Even though I was in London. Weird! But as I am playing in an inflatable and deflatable upside-down cow they can move the venue to where I am going to be. Some comics don't like the upside down cow and I can understand that the acoustics aren't perfect and will be interested to see how much noise from outside affects the show, but tonight I really enjoyed it. With the room (cow) full there was a great atmosphere and big laughs and I liked having a big stage to pace around on. Even though I left out some bits the show came in at 65 minutes, partly because a bigger audience meant more laughs and more messing around. So I will have to keep cutting, but it means that there's plenty of stuff for the longer tour version. It made me very excited about Edinburgh. Though obviously the room (cow) might not be this much fun if there aren't 400 people in it!
