<<Also, if NAQT had given out the secret formula, SCT hosts could have used it to compute rankings of the participating teams.>> Actually, our rankings can't be computed until all results from all sectionals are in hand, due to the importance of the calculation of each team's strength of schedule, which involves a comparison of the average statistics of each team's actual collective opponents over the course of their tournament with the statistics of the overall average statistics for all teams from the same division playing on the same questions in all tournaments. You need all of the results before you can compute the exact percentage by which a given team's actual schedule was statistically harder or easier than the national average, and you can't complete our formula without knowing that. <<Thirdly, if players know the secret formula, then they can use it to form strategies to optimize their chances of getting an ICT invitation.>> I've described the thing enough last year and this that the strategies are clear enough: score as many points as possible in all of your matches, and also (though admittedly less crucial until now unless an automatic invitation via a title is at stake) win as many as possible. (And if a tournament format eventually breaks into upper and lower divisions for further games, get into the higher one, even if you'd score more points and win more games in the lower, because we _have_ made it a rule for this particular case that teams from lower divisions cannot be invited ahead of teams from upper ones in the same tournament.) ESH
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