Apterous Winter Closed after-action report

[Andrew Feist]

In case you haven't been checking the front page of the tournament site, the final results:

Championship Flight:
Win -- Kirk Bevins
Place -- Charlie Reams
Show -- Stuart Arnot

Flight A:
Win -- Nick Wainwright
Place -- Matt Bayfield
Show -- Michael Wallace

Flight B:
Win -- Andrew Herbertson
Place -- John Gillies
Show -- Ian Dent

Speed Demon:
Win -- Innis Carson
Place -- Charlie Reams
Show -- Kirk Bevins

(There are still several games out to solidify some of the middle places; I'll be looking through the end of the year for these.)

From my perspective, I'm continually surprised by the tendency of the Swiss tournaments to lead to a big pile at the top. Whether it's the nature of the game, the nature of the field we have here, or some combination of the two, no one seems able to win 5 matches in a row. I will have to take this contingency into account in future; the big constraint (to me) is my desire to not have these things run forever. Perhaps one fewer Swiss round, leading into a knockout format. I've got some ideas, and most of them depend on field size.

On a similar note, I feel that the Speed Demon went amazingly well from a logistic standpoint; my back-of-the-envelope estimate is that we were scheduled to play 420 games of speed 9 in six weeks, and actually got about 380 or so played. I had guessed that it might work, since each match was only 10 minutes or so of people's time; I currently have no plans to push my luck and try something like that for the main event.

So now it's your turn: up or down for what worked and what didn't. The one thing I'm most interested in (if for no other reason that it's no-cost to me) is match length: Did matches ending in a draw make things better or worse? But opinions about Swiss vs. Holland vs. full round-robin, Sunday-to-Saturday weeks, or anything else that makes these not-as-much-fun-as-they-could-be are welcome and desired.

[Liam Tiernan]

How about allowing an overlap at the weekends for games to be played? Start each round Saturday a.m. and finish the following Sunday p.m. So if a player is away for a week or a weekend he can catch up the follwing weekend, playing two matches the same day if necessary.

[Andrew Feist]

How about allowing an overlap at the weekends for games to be played? Start each round Saturday a.m. and finish the following Sunday p.m. So if a player is away for a week or a weekend he can catch up the follwing weekend, playing two matches the same day if necessary.

I tried to remember to do this where possible (i.e., the round-robin schedules were generated on the first day, so I tried to post them a little bit early when I could). That doesn't work for Swiss at all, since you have to give a score for every game before you can get the next round (granted there are methods for handling "adjourned" games, but they're mostly pretty weak), and obviously there has to be a break for re-bracketing in a Holland.

[Ian Volante]

I'd have quite liked to play deciders in the Speed Demon, as I reckon I drew more matches out of stupidity than I should have done. However, not having the third match enabled the occasional fluky victory to count for a lot more than it would have done otherwise, and in such a high-variance format, this is probably a more desirable outcome.

As for the main tourney, it would have been nice to have longer play-off matches, but longer than three full-length games may have cut down participation unacceptably. All in all, it was pretty well balanced.