Life In 19x19

Li Kao wrote:I think you should go with a fixed bracket again. IMO that's one of the things that went right in the first tournament, but didn't work so well in the second.

I agree. When running the second tournament, I wanted to avoid the possibility of the unpleasant situation in which a player can be knocked out by playing the same opponent twice, once in each bracket. So I figured that I would transfer players to the lower bracket by hand. But the down side was that everyone was waiting on me, and unable to proceed until I had done it.
Overall, the tradeoff was not worthwhile.

I think with smart but fixed placement into the loser bracket, the chance of this happening can be made pretty small. Since most matches have a clear favourite, it should be possible to predict the development of the brackets reasonably well.