Mackenzie comments

etchuck · Tue, 19 Oct 1999 07:15:41 -0700

I guess the dearth of commentary over here on the
Mackenzie tournament needs to be filled. I won't add too
much to what had already been said about this
competition in other channels.

First off, Dave did a
very good job running this competition. I think that
all the vets (Craig, Adam, Anthony, Eric, Kenny, and
me) were very impressed at how smoothly everything
went. The field being roughly half Canadian and half
American made this competition very interesting for all
parties.

I think enough has been mentioned about the
difficulty of packets (specifically the bonuses) from Matt.
This problem was likely more exacerbated at this
competition seeing that most of the participants consisted of
freshman/sophomore teams.

I do think that in general everyone
had a good time. The Canadian teams were all very
hospitable and the American teams were all very
accommodating.

No doubt, the surprise team was Western Ontario
(placed second overall), having won out of its pool,
which included a very good Cornell foursome and a very
good F/S Michigan contingent. David has an outstanding
novice player who showed his mettle this past weekend,
so he'll have some support going into the Canadian
tournaments. He also has a very large group of teammates who
all seem very enthusiastic about competing.
Obviously, it would have been nice to see an
American-Canadian final, but I'm not sure that many of us would
have picked WO to be the Canadian rep.

I'm sure
David spent way too many hours than needed :) writing
supplemental questions and packets for Mackenzie, but to his
credit, his packets were excellent.

Obviously, if
David has the time to post any round-by-round
statistics, we can see if the bonus conversion on Matt's
rounds were significantly different from those of
David's, a couple of rounds from Steinhice/Lea's Center of
the Known Universe, or the submitted rounds from
Saxton/Rothfuss or Chuck/Levit. I'm just glad that at least our
finals packets were David's (though I think he had his
contingency 2nd-game packet be from Matt).

I will note
that despite the difficulty of Matt's packets, I will
commend him for the consistency of his writing, as well
as those of David, and Steinhice/Lea. I liked BG's
packet overall, and I think Saxton told me he enjoyed
the CWRU packet too.

Overall, a very pleasant
tournament, and we (meaning both our teams) really did enjoy
the opportunity to play.