Pairings, Is 1 Loss Acceptable, Etc.

So, we're continuing to develop things for the NOVA, and work is kicking my butt to boot!


I'm not kidding about the website update, nor about the team tournament primer ... both are almost finished.

Big question comes up, though, what if we don't have precisely 256 players?  Once we get past 128, 8 rounds are required one way or another, but what if we have less than 256?  What if we have considerably less?  What if we have 256 but 6 people no show the day of and we don't have replacements?

All good questions :)

The answer is this - we play it out anyway.  We still break people down into appropriately sized brackets, we just include the highest seeded 3-1's in the top bracket of 16.  This means it'll entirely be possible at the 2011 NOVA for someone to win it all in spite of a loss, if we don't have precisely 256 participants.  Is this bad, however?  Well, no - the winner will still have played the Kevin Bacon game of beating everyone at the event, and will still be the legitimate top finisher.



So, the other question is, how do we do pairings and seedings?  Well, first off - we're going to random pair within your win/loss bracket on Day 1, excepting for people you've already played.  As usual for this type of system if someone no-shows, odd # overlap may result in different records playing each other once or so on the edge of a bracket, but this is actually the same as in any system.

Your total score/results from day 1 will yield the appropriate seeding for your 2nd day; once seeded, that will REMAIN your seed for the 4 rounds of sets of 16 throughout that day.  So, even more than ever, the first day is purely to seed and class you, and the 2nd day is where the wins and losses count most.


Input / thoughts / questions?