eleran

Thanks for the input. There is now a significant prize to being Player of the Year. Each game everyone puts an extra dollar in, all those extra dollars go to the Player of the Year at the end of the season. Hence the desire to be as fair as possible.

It sounds like you're basically after a measure of playing skill, so the "best" players are the ones who are most likely to win. The simplest measure of this would be total points divided by games played.

This could cause people to "game" the system by not playing as many sessions as they otherwise would. But it's an informal thing, right? There are no prizes for coming first other than bragging rights? If so, maybe just telling them not to be a dick might work.

But it might not. In which case, you could reduce the number of points for low places, and not divide by the games played. Eg you could have 1st - 100 pts, 2nd - 60 pts, 3rd - 40 pts, 4th - 20 pts, 5th - 10 pts. This would reduce the incentive to skip games, but also not give your host a big advantage (since he'd actually have to place well to gain points).

Not sure what you're getting at... are you using some kind of points-based system where people get a number of points for each game they play?