I'm looking for feedback about tournament structures and prizes. I recently directed the USGC Die Hard tournament, and the way I did it was a straight McMahon, top bar 4d. For prizes I divided up the budgeted money between all players that scored 3 or 4 wins (it was a 4 round tournament). I was very happy with the way the numbers were working out until I found the budget was a little smaller than I had thought. So I had to reduce some of the amounts (in particular I wasn't happy with how low I had to go for the 4-0 players outside the overall winner, sorry about that guys!)

Anyways my main question is, do you have a preference between this method and the more traditional method the US Open uses of presetting prize bands and then doing tiebreaks to award 1st-3rd or so in those bands? Setting up prize bands can help reduce the number of people you give prizes to, so you can bump up the amounts given. But tiebreaks always seems rather arbitrary to me.

Also the Die Hard isn't quite big enough to allow any ranks to have their own prize band (in the US Open most ranks have their own band). This causes a problem of how to create a band of 4d and 3d together? Start them at the same MMS or separated by 1? If separated by 1, do you award prizes based on MMS (3d starts a point behind and stands little chance of winning) or based on NBW (this seems better to me but most official guides don't seem to do it this way, why not?)

Another question is how to handle the top group. I created a group 4d+, which had 12 players. This was best for making the top section have a decent number of players and find an overall champion, but it sorta hosed the 4d players in terms of winning anything (sorry Nick!).

Well it doesn't seem like there is a perfect solution, but I'd like to see what people think.

Also any other feedback is welcome. IMHO not having a printer in the room was the best thing that happened to the event -- pairings totally online! (Final results are still here http://tinyurl.com/9dw9yhx )

I recently played in that tournament! So, first, let me thank you for your efforts in organizing it. As with everything at the USGC, I had a great time.


As a kyu player, I have to say that it really doesn't matter. I don't enter tournaments to win prizes, and for the USGC any prize is insignificant compared to the overall cost of attending the congress.

By the way, my rating is 4 kyu, and I went 3-1 in the Diehard. Is it possible that I actually won something? I didn't stay for the final dinner, so I don't really know. (Maybe that just reinforces my point - the prizes don't matter very much for me.)

If I had to pick... if you have enough money that the prizes are actually significant, I'd probably do it the way you describe, to avoid the arbitrariness of tie breaks. But if the amount is not significant, maybe the traditional US Open way is better because the prize is more likely to be larger and more meaningful? It's a tough call.


My understanding is that everyone in a band is supposed to start with the same McMahon score. This is based on my reading of the AGA McMahon standards (http://www.usgo.org/files/pdf/AGAMcMaho ... otocol.pdf) and also the Wikipedia and Sensei's library articles about McMahon. If you use different scores, I think it effectively creates multiple bands. Sort of.


I was skeptical at first, but on-line only seemed to work really well and saved some paper.