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Show HN: The game where you test your offside decision-making skills against VAR

61 points by truetaurus 5y ago

truetaurus 5y ago
Built this in about 3 hours. Little game to test your offside decision-making skills against VAR. Send me any feedback :) Also looking for some abstract illustrations/graphics for the home page if anyone has suggestions
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  I'm not a soccer person and only have a vague sense of what the offside condition is for that sport. It would be helpful to have a reference, even just the text of the rule, for making close call decisions.
  - truetaurus 5y ago
    True good idea!
  - petepete 5y ago
    The offside rule is notoriously hard to describe. It's not even set in stone as there is a subjective element to making the judgement in some situations. There's an entire Wikipedia article about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offside_(association_football) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offside_(association_football)
  - golemiprague 5y ago
    You don't need to know the nuances, all you have to decide is whether any bodypart of the receiving player is beyoned the last defender.
- raizinho 5y ago
  It's not hard to figure out but it would be helpful to know which team (by kit color) is attacking. Also is this just a collection of (controversial) calls VAR ruled as offside? Went through about 10-15 and that's all I got.
  - truetaurus 5y ago
    Nice idea. And yeah still need to get more added. It's not that easy to find.
- rjtavares 5y ago
  Great job! It would be nice to include images without the lines VAR draws, since that give away the decision most times. Maybe then compare the score with and without lines.
  - truetaurus 5y ago
    That would be awesome but getting those images are tricky unfortunately.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Or maybe covering up the graphics on the screen that says "Onside" like the 26 October City v Villa
- grawprog 5y ago
  I was not actually able to try the game. The images all loaded as blank white squares for me on mobile. It also seems to hijack the browser back button every time a picture is clicked.
  - truetaurus 5y ago
    Hmm what browser and mobile device do you have?
    - grawprog 5y ago
      Android. Using habit browser.
- bl0b 5y ago
  Love it. It's pretty much always: I thinks onside, VAR says offside.
- pvg 5y ago
  It'd be interesting to see how one's decisions compare to other people's decisions or other similar opportunities to yell at someone or something that the decision was wrong and everyone involved in making it was blind, in the pay of bettings sites, maliciously biased, etc.
- logikblok 5y ago
  Hey nice one. Couple of ideas: - Add a time limit for decisions? Count down clock perhaps, forces users to make a choice quick and adds an element of pressure? - Illustrations, my go to is always: https://www.manypixels.co/gallery https://www.manypixels.co/gallery you'll see there are lots of football ones under the sports category.
  - truetaurus 5y ago
    nice thanks!
- mgalgs 5y ago
  Really awesome idea! I'd love some kind of aggregated stats/summary page where you could see the most-disagreed-with decisions, etc.
analyst74 5y ago
Fun idea, I tried a few, and VAR is always wrong, is that the point of the project, to show how bad they are?
- truetaurus 5y ago
  That's up for debate of course. But generally I would say var has been horrible
nataliescy 5y ago
I tried - and it's kinda hard for a not EU league fan to see which team is offensive/defensive. maybe it's just me.
- truetaurus 5y ago
  That true. Thinking on this to make it easier to know the situation.
fastball 5y ago
Every single (50ish) one I did was offside.
- Graffur 5y ago
  Same. This probably skews the stats at the bottom for agreed/disagreed with VAR since some people might try play this game to be correct.
jkingsbery 5y ago
My understanding is that the offside rule is based on where the players' feet are, but based on this VAR is doing it based off of any body part. Do I have the rule right? Or is the VAR bad at distinguishing feet from other body parts? In any case, well done! In North American sports, there's a push to use a similar sort of system in baseball for calling balls/strikes, I'd be curious to compare my judgement against the computer system they're testing in some minor leagues.
- truetaurus 5y ago
  If done right var could be awesome but it's flawed right now. Also there is no more "we will give you the benefit of the doubt". There needs to be a little leeway. About the rule: someone suggested to state the rule somewhere so we do that soon.
  - bl0b 5y ago
    I agree entirely. At least the VAR people should admit that there is an inherent margin of error in the technology (camera framerate, image resolution, blur..), and offsides calls should only be made when the result is outside that (somehow quantified) margin of error.
- samlittlewood 5y ago
  Any part of the body that can play the ball - so everything except arms and hands.
- awb 5y ago
  > My understanding is that the offside rule is based on where the players' feet are, but based on this VAR is doing it based off of any body part. Do I have the rule right? Not quite. Head, body and feet all count. https://www.thefa.com/football-rules-governance/lawsandrules/laws/football-11-11/law-11---offside https://www.thefa.com/football-rules-governance/lawsandrules... > A player is in an offside position if: any part of the head, body or feet is in the opponents’ half (excluding the halfway line) and any part of the head, body or feet is nearer to the opponents’ goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent > The hands and arms of all players, including the goalkeepers, are not considered. > A player is not in an offside position if level with the: second-last opponent or last two opponents
re 5y ago
VAR is Video Assistant Referee, i.e. an off-field (human) official that manually checks calls using instant replay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_assistant_referee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_assistant_referee I don't follow association football at all and was unfamiliar with the term; based on the comments here I was guessing it was maybe some sort of machine learning algorithm.
gabagool 5y ago
What's the ratio of not offsides to offsides on the site? Going through it, it seems like a ratio of 1:20. I know the goal of the website is to show how VAR is broken, but there seems to be a lot of bias in the uploading/presenting. It'd be cool if there was a more even split in the scenarios presented.
- bl0b 5y ago
  I think the problem is that VAR for offsides errs only in the direction of call-things-offsides-that-shouldn't-be. I can't think of a time where it gave a goal that I though should have been called back, but so many times was a goal called back that seems like it shouldn't have.
  - LanceH 5y ago
    It's actually better than it used to be though. I can't even count the number of goals and breakaways that were called back by the linesman because surely that guy who is open by 5 yards was offside. The current interpretation of the rule appears to take "level with" the 2nd to last defender to be a zone of infinitesimal width. So having your body lined up with the defender's isn't enough to be level with if a pinky finger is extended beyond them. A player could have his entire torso behind the defender and be offside if his arm or toe extends beyond the defender. The defender could literally (by any reasonable definition) be between the forward and the goal and it would still be offside. It's like they saw the NFL's ruling on what is a catch and thought it was a contest. I actually like VAR, because referees and linesmen preferred to call back goals rather than risk an offside goal be allowed. So it is progress, but they wrote the rule to be a mechanical judgement, rather than a human one (as rugby does).
    - mrunkel 5y ago
      > he current interpretation of the rule appears to take "level with" the 2nd to last defender to be a zone of infinitesimal width. So having your body lined up with the defender's isn't enough to be level with if a pinky finger is extended beyond them. A player could have his entire torso behind the defender and be offside if his arm or toe extends beyond the defender. The defender could literally (by any reasonable definition) be between the forward and the goal and it would still be offside. Only parts of the body that can score goal are used to judge offside. So, pinkies or arms don’t count. And I don’t understand what you mean about “level with.” What should level with mean in your mind? No more than x cm ahead? Something is either equal something else or it’s not.
dvt 5y ago
This goes to show how absolutely atrocious VAR is. Not only does it detect arms[1] as "offsides" in many cases, but in others it's blatantly wrong[2]. In [2], there's at least 2 (potentially 3) Alavés players closer to the goal line than Barça's offense. [1] https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/offside-or-not.appspot.com/o/offsides%2F1618339764746_FulhamvsWolverhamptonWanderers?alt=media&token=a722d15b-0de7-494f-b106-ad3684e3ad6f https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/offside-or-not.a... [2] https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/offside-or-not.appspot.com/o/offsides%2F1618178574615_FCBarcelonavsSportiveAlav%C3%A9s?alt=media&token=ba0f0412-2a37-43c8-b917-4d24225a719e https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/offside-or-not.a...
- vemv 5y ago
  VAR is just people, it's not like an algorithm is dictating the results.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jbverschoor 5y ago
What is VAR? I thought it’d be some coding challenge about car, let, const It looks like it could mean Visual Automated Referee. Or Video Assisted Referee
- livre 5y ago
  The way I've seen it implemented is as "Video Assisted Referee" and it's just a bunch of people outside the field looking at different screens and determining whether someone was offside or not. It's just some extra eyes in addition to the people in the field. I haven't seen the other definition (the automated one).
- PhillyG 5y ago
  Video assistant referee - basically extra referees who help to make decisions by watching replays - used in many major Football (soccer) tournaments. In the offside rule (used in Pro competitions) you can't pass to a teammate, who is stood nearer to the opposing teams goal than any of the opposing team, excluding the goalkeeper. Subtle, brief, hard to spot infractions of the offside rule are possible. So one use of VAR is: when the regular referees think someone may have been offside during the lead up to scoring, they can pause the game and wait for the VAR team to look through where people where when the pass in question happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_assistant_referee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_assistant_referee
willhoyle 5y ago
I think it's valid to question whether VAR is broken or not, however I think in the end it's a net benefit to football. Some will say it wasn't ready for production, but we all know real world usage is the real test that surfaces issues. And I say this as a Spurs supporter who's been burnt by VAR far too many times to count. Also, thanks for not calling the website offsideSornot.com ;)
esolyt 5y ago
In half of these positions, it's hard to tell which player is attacking. It would be nice if there was a note that explains which team we are looking at.
pySSK 5y ago
Are you training an AI VAR? Imagine Offside or Not for Captcha instead! I would genuinely enjoy that.
- truetaurus 5y ago
  haaha thats a genius idea!
arthurcolle 5y ago
Thought this meant Value-at-Risk initially... ... I was wrong
truetaurus 5y ago
New feature: The results are displayed as a percentage of who agrees or disagrees with VAR
jimi_d 5y ago
I gave it a go, don't know the rules of soccer and wasn't sure what I was supposed to answer. Is the VAR always right? Or is the aim of the game to compare your vision to a bot's?
- truetaurus 5y ago
  So VAR is not a bot, there is actually a person behind it. But the aim is basically to see if you would agree with their decision or not. I will soon add some help page to help people understand the offside rule.
dylan604 5y ago
The thing that kills me about VAR is that it is only being used for technical definition of the offside position rather than the spirit of the law. The offside law is to prevent cherry picking type of play where the attacker has an obvious advantage because of their location on the pitch. These hyper critical looks that VAR are giving us are down to the millimeter, and there is no advantage whatsoever of these positions on the pitch these players have. Other uses of VAR have been fine. Ensuring a penalty was correct as called or as not called seems fair as it is a pretty crucial moment to basically be awarding a goal (I said basically). Being able to use replays to ensure the correct people are being cautioned/ejected is also okay in my book.
ibdf 5y ago
The problem with VAR is that it thinks armpits are important in a soccer game. it should be measured either by the player's foot position in case of indirect goal, or by the the player's body part that scored the goal if a direct goal (goal score as a result of the touch). Also... why is the resolution so poor? Sometimes there's only one camera angle.
- truetaurus 5y ago
  Not easy to get the images, plus you can click on them to enlarge
truetaurus 5y ago
NEW CHANGES AFTER HEARING YOUR FEEDBACK. Attacking/Defending team specified AND colors to know which team is which! Summarized here: https://twitter.com/strange_quirks/status/1383410009850060813 https://twitter.com/strange_quirks/status/138341000985006081...

61 points by truetaurus 5y ago

Built this in about 3 hours. Little game to test your offside decision-making skills against VAR. Send me any feedback :) Also looking for some abstract illustrations/graphics for the home page if anyone has suggestions

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
InitialLastName 5y ago
I'm not a soccer person and only have a vague sense of what the offside condition is for that sport. It would be helpful to have a reference, even just the text of the rule, for making close call decisions.
- truetaurus 5y ago
  True good idea!
- petepete 5y ago
  The offside rule is notoriously hard to describe. It's not even set in stone as there is a subjective element to making the judgement in some situations. There's an entire Wikipedia article about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offside_(association_football) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offside_(association_football)
- golemiprague 5y ago
  You don't need to know the nuances, all you have to decide is whether any bodypart of the receiving player is beyoned the last defender.
raizinho 5y ago
It's not hard to figure out but it would be helpful to know which team (by kit color) is attacking. Also is this just a collection of (controversial) calls VAR ruled as offside? Went through about 10-15 and that's all I got.
- truetaurus 5y ago
  Nice idea. And yeah still need to get more added. It's not that easy to find.
rjtavares 5y ago
Great job! It would be nice to include images without the lines VAR draws, since that give away the decision most times. Maybe then compare the score with and without lines.
- truetaurus 5y ago
  That would be awesome but getting those images are tricky unfortunately.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Or maybe covering up the graphics on the screen that says "Onside" like the 26 October City v Villa
grawprog 5y ago
I was not actually able to try the game. The images all loaded as blank white squares for me on mobile. It also seems to hijack the browser back button every time a picture is clicked.
- truetaurus 5y ago
  Hmm what browser and mobile device do you have?
  - grawprog 5y ago
    Android. Using habit browser.
bl0b 5y ago
Love it. It's pretty much always: I thinks onside, VAR says offside.
pvg 5y ago
It'd be interesting to see how one's decisions compare to other people's decisions or other similar opportunities to yell at someone or something that the decision was wrong and everyone involved in making it was blind, in the pay of bettings sites, maliciously biased, etc.
logikblok 5y ago
Hey nice one. Couple of ideas: - Add a time limit for decisions? Count down clock perhaps, forces users to make a choice quick and adds an element of pressure? - Illustrations, my go to is always: https://www.manypixels.co/gallery https://www.manypixels.co/gallery you'll see there are lots of football ones under the sports category.
- truetaurus 5y ago
  nice thanks!
mgalgs 5y ago
Really awesome idea! I'd love some kind of aggregated stats/summary page where you could see the most-disagreed-with decisions, etc.

analyst74 5y ago

Fun idea, I tried a few, and VAR is always wrong, is that the point of the project, to show how bad they are?

truetaurus 5y ago
That's up for debate of course. But generally I would say var has been horrible

nataliescy 5y ago

I tried - and it's kinda hard for a not EU league fan to see which team is offensive/defensive. maybe it's just me.

truetaurus 5y ago
That true. Thinking on this to make it easier to know the situation.

fastball 5y ago

Every single (50ish) one I did was offside.

Graffur 5y ago
Same. This probably skews the stats at the bottom for agreed/disagreed with VAR since some people might try play this game to be correct.

jkingsbery 5y ago

My understanding is that the offside rule is based on where the players' feet are, but based on this VAR is doing it based off of any body part. Do I have the rule right? Or is the VAR bad at distinguishing feet from other body parts? In any case, well done! In North American sports, there's a push to use a similar sort of system in baseball for calling balls/strikes, I'd be curious to compare my judgement against the computer system they're testing in some minor leagues.

truetaurus 5y ago
If done right var could be awesome but it's flawed right now. Also there is no more "we will give you the benefit of the doubt". There needs to be a little leeway. About the rule: someone suggested to state the rule somewhere so we do that soon.
- bl0b 5y ago
  I agree entirely. At least the VAR people should admit that there is an inherent margin of error in the technology (camera framerate, image resolution, blur..), and offsides calls should only be made when the result is outside that (somehow quantified) margin of error.
samlittlewood 5y ago
Any part of the body that can play the ball - so everything except arms and hands.
awb 5y ago
> My understanding is that the offside rule is based on where the players' feet are, but based on this VAR is doing it based off of any body part. Do I have the rule right? Not quite. Head, body and feet all count. https://www.thefa.com/football-rules-governance/lawsandrules/laws/football-11-11/law-11---offside https://www.thefa.com/football-rules-governance/lawsandrules... > A player is in an offside position if: any part of the head, body or feet is in the opponents’ half (excluding the halfway line) and any part of the head, body or feet is nearer to the opponents’ goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent > The hands and arms of all players, including the goalkeepers, are not considered. > A player is not in an offside position if level with the: second-last opponent or last two opponents

re 5y ago

VAR is Video Assistant Referee, i.e. an off-field (human) official that manually checks calls using instant replay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_assistant_referee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_assistant_referee I don't follow association football at all and was unfamiliar with the term; based on the comments here I was guessing it was maybe some sort of machine learning algorithm.

gabagool 5y ago

What's the ratio of not offsides to offsides on the site? Going through it, it seems like a ratio of 1:20. I know the goal of the website is to show how VAR is broken, but there seems to be a lot of bias in the uploading/presenting. It'd be cool if there was a more even split in the scenarios presented.

bl0b 5y ago
I think the problem is that VAR for offsides errs only in the direction of call-things-offsides-that-shouldn't-be. I can't think of a time where it gave a goal that I though should have been called back, but so many times was a goal called back that seems like it shouldn't have.
- LanceH 5y ago
  It's actually better than it used to be though. I can't even count the number of goals and breakaways that were called back by the linesman because surely that guy who is open by 5 yards was offside. The current interpretation of the rule appears to take "level with" the 2nd to last defender to be a zone of infinitesimal width. So having your body lined up with the defender's isn't enough to be level with if a pinky finger is extended beyond them. A player could have his entire torso behind the defender and be offside if his arm or toe extends beyond the defender. The defender could literally (by any reasonable definition) be between the forward and the goal and it would still be offside. It's like they saw the NFL's ruling on what is a catch and thought it was a contest. I actually like VAR, because referees and linesmen preferred to call back goals rather than risk an offside goal be allowed. So it is progress, but they wrote the rule to be a mechanical judgement, rather than a human one (as rugby does).
  - mrunkel 5y ago
    > he current interpretation of the rule appears to take "level with" the 2nd to last defender to be a zone of infinitesimal width. So having your body lined up with the defender's isn't enough to be level with if a pinky finger is extended beyond them. A player could have his entire torso behind the defender and be offside if his arm or toe extends beyond the defender. The defender could literally (by any reasonable definition) be between the forward and the goal and it would still be offside. Only parts of the body that can score goal are used to judge offside. So, pinkies or arms don’t count. And I don’t understand what you mean about “level with.” What should level with mean in your mind? No more than x cm ahead? Something is either equal something else or it’s not.

dvt 5y ago

This goes to show how absolutely atrocious VAR is. Not only does it detect arms[1] as "offsides" in many cases, but in others it's blatantly wrong[2]. In [2], there's at least 2 (potentially 3) Alavés players closer to the goal line than Barça's offense. [1] https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/offside-or-not.appspot.com/o/offsides%2F1618339764746_FulhamvsWolverhamptonWanderers?alt=media&token=a722d15b-0de7-494f-b106-ad3684e3ad6f https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/offside-or-not.a... [2] https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/offside-or-not.appspot.com/o/offsides%2F1618178574615_FCBarcelonavsSportiveAlav%C3%A9s?alt=media&token=ba0f0412-2a37-43c8-b917-4d24225a719e https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/offside-or-not.a...

vemv 5y ago
VAR is just people, it's not like an algorithm is dictating the results.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

jbverschoor 5y ago

What is VAR? I thought it’d be some coding challenge about car, let, const It looks like it could mean Visual Automated Referee. Or Video Assisted Referee

livre 5y ago
The way I've seen it implemented is as "Video Assisted Referee" and it's just a bunch of people outside the field looking at different screens and determining whether someone was offside or not. It's just some extra eyes in addition to the people in the field. I haven't seen the other definition (the automated one).
PhillyG 5y ago
Video assistant referee - basically extra referees who help to make decisions by watching replays - used in many major Football (soccer) tournaments. In the offside rule (used in Pro competitions) you can't pass to a teammate, who is stood nearer to the opposing teams goal than any of the opposing team, excluding the goalkeeper. Subtle, brief, hard to spot infractions of the offside rule are possible. So one use of VAR is: when the regular referees think someone may have been offside during the lead up to scoring, they can pause the game and wait for the VAR team to look through where people where when the pass in question happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_assistant_referee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_assistant_referee

willhoyle 5y ago

I think it's valid to question whether VAR is broken or not, however I think in the end it's a net benefit to football. Some will say it wasn't ready for production, but we all know real world usage is the real test that surfaces issues. And I say this as a Spurs supporter who's been burnt by VAR far too many times to count. Also, thanks for not calling the website offsideSornot.com ;)

esolyt 5y ago

In half of these positions, it's hard to tell which player is attacking. It would be nice if there was a note that explains which team we are looking at.

pySSK 5y ago

Are you training an AI VAR? Imagine Offside or Not for Captcha instead! I would genuinely enjoy that.

truetaurus 5y ago
haaha thats a genius idea!

arthurcolle 5y ago

Thought this meant Value-at-Risk initially... ... I was wrong

truetaurus 5y ago

New feature: The results are displayed as a percentage of who agrees or disagrees with VAR

jimi_d 5y ago

I gave it a go, don't know the rules of soccer and wasn't sure what I was supposed to answer. Is the VAR always right? Or is the aim of the game to compare your vision to a bot's?

truetaurus 5y ago
So VAR is not a bot, there is actually a person behind it. But the aim is basically to see if you would agree with their decision or not. I will soon add some help page to help people understand the offside rule.

dylan604 5y ago

The thing that kills me about VAR is that it is only being used for technical definition of the offside position rather than the spirit of the law. The offside law is to prevent cherry picking type of play where the attacker has an obvious advantage because of their location on the pitch. These hyper critical looks that VAR are giving us are down to the millimeter, and there is no advantage whatsoever of these positions on the pitch these players have. Other uses of VAR have been fine. Ensuring a penalty was correct as called or as not called seems fair as it is a pretty crucial moment to basically be awarding a goal (I said basically). Being able to use replays to ensure the correct people are being cautioned/ejected is also okay in my book.

ibdf 5y ago

The problem with VAR is that it thinks armpits are important in a soccer game. it should be measured either by the player's foot position in case of indirect goal, or by the the player's body part that scored the goal if a direct goal (goal score as a result of the touch). Also... why is the resolution so poor? Sometimes there's only one camera angle.

truetaurus 5y ago
Not easy to get the images, plus you can click on them to enlarge

truetaurus 5y ago

NEW CHANGES AFTER HEARING YOUR FEEDBACK. Attacking/Defending team specified AND colors to know which team is which! Summarized here: https://twitter.com/strange_quirks/status/1383410009850060813 https://twitter.com/strange_quirks/status/138341000985006081...