I was a little disturbed by the format TRASH employed when they had ample skills and resources to do better. Sure, skewed brackets are an inevitability at any tournament where many of the teams have little or no experience playing each other. It's no secret that it can be tough to compare West Coast teams (including the one who won the tournament) to the rest of the field, for instance. However, none of the mechanisms one could use to self-correct bracketing mistakes were used. Instead, out-of-bracket games were preprogrammed in such a way as to _amplify_ the bracketing mistakes. A similar format is used at Trashmasters, but it is a necessary evil at that kind of submission tournament where multiple submissions have to be combined to make extra rounds and therefore byes have to be predetermined. There was no reason other than possibly time (and time constrants, on Saturday at least, were not really an issue at this tournament) for using this method. The end result was a down-to-the-wire match in Round 11 between my team, Worst Episode Ever (3rd overall) and Shelby Foote Soldiers, the loser of which could finish no higher than 13th. Neither of these teams deserved to play a game where the loser was relegated to finishing 13th. With a total of 16 rounds available, what should have happened is more like this : For rounds 1-7, each team plays a set of games within their pre-ordained bracket. For rounds 8-14, each team, based on their placement in rounds 1-7, are moved into a set of even-strength pools. (There are a number of different ways to do this. There will be one rematch total.) The result will be a set of 32 comparable records, and you've got two rounds left to pick a winner. [Note : This method actually works better with either 30 (5x6) or 36 (6x6) or 42 (7x6) teams, in which case there are no rematches before playoffs and playoffs can begin after 10 rounds.]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:44 AM EST EST