Complete and utter FOISTage

Durham_Devil · Mon, 30 Jul 2001 10:03:53 -0700

First and foremost, thanks to John Nam for his
comments earlier. This definitely was a ton of work. If I
do something like this again, it will not be for a
few years.

Also, I will say this much about my
tournament: by following the Hillemann format (3 prelim
rounds), I noticed that the rounds had unequal weight.
This actually came into play in the Worst-Case
Scenario, as I will outline later. Furthermore, I wonder if
trash and singles really do go together to this extent,
as the playoff seedings were rendered
incomprehensibly meaningless by the end. Oh, well, at least
everyone had a good time, even when it finished around
12:15 AM (!), which is my personal record for a qb
tournament, and apparently a GWU campus record too. The
author is curious as to what the overall record
is.

As for the screw rule: reports are it was very good
to use in the prelims. For reasons I should've
anticipated, the overwhelming majority decided not to use it
in the double-elim portion. Nevertheless, I
recommend that it be tried at other tournaments of this
nature.

For those of you who will note a name conspicuous by
his absence: James Dinan played in two prelim rounds
(and, from all indications, won both going away) before
having to head back to work. For Round 3, everyone from
his bracket moved up a spot from where they finished.
In addition, we wound up having 26 and not 25. Until
James left. Well, anyway, things worked out here.
Really.

Okay, first and foremost, the winner of the consolation
bracket was Adam Fine, who played very well and won every
match he was in... except the all-important Round 2,
where he finished last. Adam's prize was a free copy of
the questions (on sale now, $10 for 400
TUs).

The top 16 entering were:

1. Art Fleming
2.
Erik Nielsen
3. Phil Castagna
4. Dwight
Kidder
5. Matt Weiner
6. John Nam
7. Michael
Philpy
8. Benjamin Gross
9. Stephanie Walker
10.
Anthony de Jesus
11. Carey Clevenger
12. Joe
Wirzburger
13. Thad Novak
14. John McGhee
15. Tim
Young
16. Matt Lafer

(For those curious, I left the
first rounds unseeded. This resulted in Fleming,
Weiner, Nam, Philpy, and Young in a Round 1 bracket.
Wild.)

And the double elim results, using the standard (win,
LOSS) notation:

1. Fleming (Lafer, Gross, Novak,
Nam, Young)
2. Young (NIELSEN, Philpy, Castagna,
Lafer, Nam, Nielsen, FLEMING)
3. Nielsen (Young, DE
JESUS, Clevenger, Novak, Kidder, YOUNG)
4. Kidder
(NOVAK, Wirzburger, Gross, De Jesus, NIELSEN)
5. Nam
(Clevenger, Castagna, De Jesus, FLEMING, YOUNG)
6. De
Jesus (Philpy, Nielsen, NAM, KIDDER)
7. Novak
(Kidder, Weiner, FLEMING, NIELSEN)
8. Lafer (FLEMING,
Walker, Weiner, YOUNG)
9. Castagna (McGhee, NAM,
YOUNG)
10. Weiner (Wirzburger, NOVAK, LAFER)
11. Gross
(Walker, FLEMING, KIDDER)
12. Clevenger (NAM, McGhee,
NIELSEN)
13. Philpy (DE JESUS, YOUNG)
14. Walker (GROSS,
LAFER)
15. Wirzburger (WEINER, KIDDER)
16. McGhee
(CASTAGNA, CLEVENGER)

As for John Nam's comment about
"standard double-elim bracketing": I wasn't aware that the
precedent drawn up for double-elim brackets was such that
the winners bracket runner-up was guaranteed no worse
than third. I went with the first one I was shown,
which was loosely based on Swiss pairing and had all
four losers bracket participants in Round 5 (when all
are 3-1) on equal footing. I apologize for the
confusion.

For winning, Art Fleming got first choice among some
fine rasslin-related items. He chose the video "Best
of Survivor Series". Tim Young chose a toy wrestling
ring complete with Hulk Hogan and Ted DiBiase action
figures. Erik Nielsen chose the book _Positively Page: The
Diamond Dallas Page Journey_. John Nam and Dwight Kidder
agreed that Nam would have the Sting T-shirt, while
Kidder took the Bret Hart color photo.

Thanks to
everyone for putting up with my insanity! I'll see you all
soon, hopefully, and I'll k