As we can see from many others sports the benefits of adding a higher more difficult scoring option are evident. The question isn’t if we should have one, but where?
It’s hard because of our varying court size, so I suggest a tangent line parallel to the goal line at the top of crease, just right for a sick save to full court ripper.
I like the confidence, dont like the proposition. 3 up is best polo, it would hurt that strat
@flat_humour Change things for sure, but why do you view it as a detriment? It’s a lot easier to score closer to the goal. Surly you’re still covering the goal when you play 3 up!? Full disclosure I agree with you, campers in crease make for a stale game.
If you love three-up polo then you might like to think about how the risk of long shots discourages it. I’ve suggested that in order to encourage more three-up, shots from the defensive half should be disallowed when all three opponents are in that half.
A perfect example of this problem in action can be seen in the first final at Euros this year. Vanguard are down 1-0 with less than two minutes to go and need to score so they start playing hard three up. They have pretty good possession control in their offensive half and lose the ball just momentarily when one of the players on Nebula puts a single controlling touch on the ball and rips a fucking dinger from level with the top of the crease.
The moment occurs at 5:09:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQNPzm0IN88&t=428s
More teams would employ three up tactics at less desperate moments if this kind of risk was removed from the game.
The reality is that most teams leave a goalie in to eliminate this risk. We will never see three up play while the risk of long shots exist. If you really want to see more teams play three up then a change like this is essential.
The long shot in question was cool af and the fear of losing such moments is usually what funds the pushback I get when I propose this rule. I just wonder if singular exciting moments like these, as cool as they are, outweigh the downsides of deterring people from playing three up. If you truly love watching people play three up then maybe you’d be prepared to forego the long shots to see more of it.
If you really hate the idea then I’m prepared to meet in the middle. Bank shots from over half can stay! Heck, count tham as two goals for all I care. : P
I can see how you’d think an additional point would compound the problem you already see with long shots. I feel like you’d have to do some sort of offsides rule to compliment it, as cherry picking, much like your video example, (Pretty sure a defender jumped over the ball :P) would be too strong.
Right now you pay the price of surprise rippers, but the team that doesn’t pays a bigger one still in playing 3v2 and a lesser one being a boring game that one player “has” to watch even if they insist they like it.
I think your no halveses unless were backses is worth testing in pick-up or even a tournament, make a post about it! Banks for two could do, but only on some courts 
You can probably guess that I disagree with this statement. The cost of conceding a goal from a long shot clearly outweighs the power of three up. Otherwise, why would we see all the top teams playing with a goalie in? The game theory behind this is reducible to the value of each goal. Most competitive games are low scoring and clearly conceding a single goal from a long shot is a cost that teams are not willing the bare. I see no simple way to drive down the value of a goal and the alternative I have proposed seems like an easier solution.
With only a single exception I can think of, every big continental final has been a back and forth battle of two offensive players vs. three defenders. It was bitter sweet for me that vanguard were punished so hard for playing three up and it’s no surprise that two players from Excuse The Mess were involved. Their final against Octopussy in the 2018 EHBPC was my cited exception to the 2v3 rule. Dig up that game and tell me it isn’t one of the best looking games in the history of bike polo…
It’s an easy one to test and I encourage everyone to try it.
I don’t want to write an essay about why ETM played 3 up, why it didn’t work in 2023, why it is hard to play like that with Vanguard, etc., etc., but I can tell that one of the reasons against playing 3 up now is that more and more players find it easy to create a space and then make a full-court shot. Imagine how harder it will be to play three up (which looks like something that people enjoy) when you risk losing not one, but two points.
Yeah, as a person who defintely likes to punish leaving the goal empty from my own half, I emotionally am against prohibiting such shots, but you make a pretty compelling argument for it 
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However, I don’t generally like too many rules/restrictions to the natural flow of the game, and would rather they focused on keeping the game safe, instead of trying to ‘rebalance’ the game.
Maybe - just maybe - if playing three-up and thus having more passing, etc is what we crave - let’s play on bigger courts and play 4v4 (—> more like hockey)?
Or go the other direction entirely - make the goals way smaller and prohibit any player in the crease at all, so everyone is 3 up all the time, but scoring is that bit harder (—> more like basketball)?
“No one in the crease” changes nothing. Goalie will stay just next to the crease, been there, done that :)
There was a 4v4 tournament on flats with no goalies in Prague.
My personal opinion is: don’t change the rules to enforce a style of the game you like. Almost for sure the outcome will be different than you expect. If you want to promote some game style, just play like that and show others it is worth it.
Of course it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t change any rules. If there is something that ruins how the game looks and there is an easy rule to introduce that can change it, let’s do it (i.e. mallet hooking, screening, high sticking)! But if the rule isn’t directly related to something then we are not sure that change will: a) give us an expected outcome b) give us no harmful side-effects.
No, I fully agree, my ideas in the last paragraph were definitely provocative and not actual proposals to implement outside of ‘just for fun’ games/tournaments and/or drills for focusing on some particular aspects of the game.
Ah, see, the crease would be bigger! maybe not b-ball 3 sec field big, but big! :P