Some fighters have a base of outside support they can draw upon that is just much larger than that of others. They may be running a large mailing list from their site or a popular interactive game or web board. By contrast other fighters share a computer with their parents, hold down full and part time jobs, have family responsibilities or are on mailing lists where consistent daily begging is not allowed. Handicapping prevents a fighter with stupendous scores from knocking others out of competition. Those other fighters then move on or remain based on the adjusted figure.
Fighters move on, remain, or drop out based on the adjusted score.
A binodal or two tiered score distribution happens when one group of fighters does much better than another. If you graph this you see two humps like the back of a cammel. Each hump represents a group of fighters whose scores cluster about two different numbers. If this occurs with some frequency, the House Managers, and Trustees, with consensus of the community, will split the upper levels of competition into two tiers like major and minor leagues or A and B swim teams, in order to give everyone a shot at winning. Back to the top of the page.