Life In 19x19

So... looking at the SPOT1 pairings, 4 out of 8 quads are having two players play against each other for a second time.

Is it just me, or is this just messed up?

You're never supposed to have two people play each other in a tournament(exception is in the finals of a double elimination tournament), and here we are with it happening 4 times.

Seriously, what?

I know, I've been having a hard time understanding this format.

Its like 8 mini tournaments, and these are head-to-head tiebreakers to get into the main tournament now.

Not only the tournament format, but the webpage format leaves lot to be desired as well .

I asked "Do the TDs want the games evented?"
answer "Yes, they're all even games.."


Presentation could do with some polish, but the games are running smoothly enough it seems.

I think the double elimination made sense, I think grouping people into 4's and 5's didn't, I was one of the aforementioned "doubles". Carson Tu and I played twice. Which, don't get me wrong, was nice, (it was a good lesson for me). But I remember thinking to myself after I managed to hang on against Carlos with a win... "wouldn't it nice to be able to play Hugh Zhang, or Daniel Gordeau, or any of the rest of the crowd at 1-1." It would have been nice to have some mixing, not only because my bracket was fiendishly hard (I've seen Carson Tu beat a pro before, Jie Liang is, well, Jie Liang, and Carlos is EGF 5d I believe...)

Anyway, I had a great time, but yeah, a little mixing would have been great.

(Also, the webpage could use a little work... things are organized...oddly)

What really annoys me is that 2 people continue out of a group of 4-5 people, but not everyone plays everyone else, so often times, the player who's plays the number 1 spot doesn't get a chance to play the person who eventually got the number 2 spot. Gus Price never played Gan Jianing for a chance at the second entry, Nick Jhirad didn't get to play Liang Jie, and Zhou Yixian didn't get to play Wang Yinli.

If the goal is to get 2 people out of 4-5, you should have a round robin, or a Swiss system, then take the 2 top scoring people(with tiebreaks). If the goal is to use double elimination to thin down to 16 people, then the loser's bracket should be arranged to avoid two people playing each other twice.

It's the basics of tournament directing, and they messed it up, with such a small field too.

the groups with 5 people... while not obvious, was for the Canadian pre-qualifiers, as there were only 4 allotted places (and apparently YongFei Ge didn't need to pre-qualify).

I wouldn't mind having this problem...

More seriously, that does sound like it could have been done better.