Adam wrote: "Nonetheless, I never understood why Round 1 means so little in the Hillemann format. Why can't you simply take the total of the scores in the first two rounds, while maintaining the change of rooms between rounds to allow for variety of opponents?" Bill wrote: "Another suggestion: take the sum of the *ranks* in the first two rounds (ie in Adam's case: 1st + 5th = 6). Then use Round 3 to break ties in the sums. This would weight Rounds 1 and 2 equally." But you wouldn't want Rounds 1 and 2 weighted equally at all, unless you want to seed the field, the necessity for which is what Round 1 is intended to avoid. Placement into rooms for Round 1 is random, and rooms will, quite possibly, be of wildly unequal strength. But even if that is so, Round 1 results provide at least a rough sort of the field into rooms for the all-important Round 2 that are bound to at least better approximate equal-strength rooms--each will contain one player who finished 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. in the round before. Thus Round 2 is far more suitable to be the really important round, and this is why (at least when the requisite number of questions is available) this round is made far and away the longest one, giving the players in each room as much opportunity as possible to play themselves into the right order. It's a game, not a science, so if you have a bad Round 2 and fail to make the cut-off for the top 16, well that's just life for that game, not a permanent branding of ability. Adam's idea of totalling the scores from the first two rounds is a fine variant, especially since Round 1 (with unequalized rooms) is much shorter than the roughly-equalized Round 2, so Round 2 would still retain a weightier weight. Bill's idea of actually weighting these two rounds equally is NOT a good idea, unless you change the whole approach, seed the field by hand for Round 1, and make the two rounds of equal length. Eric Hillemann
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