From britdisc-owner@csv.warwick.ac.uk Wed Mar 1 15:24:11 2000 Received: (from daemon@localhost) by pansy.csv.warwick.ac.uk (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.3) id PAA22369 for britdisc-outgoing; Wed, 1 Mar 2000 15:20:51 GMT Received: from daffodil.csv.warwick.ac.uk (daffodil [137.205.192.30]) by pansy.csv.warwick.ac.uk (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA22070 for <britdisc@csv.warwick.ac.uk>; Wed, 1 Mar 2000 15:20:25 GMT Received: from haymarket.ed.ac.uk (haymarket.ed.ac.uk [129.215.128.53]) by daffodil.csv.warwick.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA11227 for <britdisc@csv.warwick.ac.uk>; Wed, 1 Mar 2000 15:20:24 GMT Received: from srv1.mech.ed.ac.uk (SRV1.mech.ed.ac.uk [129.215.113.68]) by haymarket.ed.ac.uk (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id LAA01790 for <britdisc@csv.warwick.ac.uk>; Wed, 1 Mar 2000 11:56:25 GMT Message-Id: <200003011156.LAA01790@haymarket.ed.ac.uk> Received: from MECH-SRV1/SpoolDir by srv1.mech.ed.ac.uk (Mercury 1.44); 1 Mar 00 11:56:25 +0000 Received: from SpoolDir by MECH-SRV1 (Mercury 1.44); 1 Mar 00 11:56:00 +0000 From: "Timothy Rogers" <trogers@srv1.mech.ed.ac.uk> Organization: Mechanical Engineering To: britdisc@csv.warwick.ac.uk Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 11:55:55 +0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Tour Format X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v2.53/R1) Sender: owner-britdisc@warwick.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Just to clarify a couple of things I said. I'm not opposed to the Tour, playing for Soup last season we had some cracking games and the general standard within the team improved. It was also a superb preparation for Worlds. The issue is really one of getting teams of the same standard to play other teams of the same and slightly better standard. Being exploited is how one improves. Even in the top 8, if you dropped down you lost the opportunity to play the top 4 and since 5 to 12 was much of a muchness, improvement over the weekend was reduced. Ok, I accept that some of this is unavoidable in order to get teams of the same quality playing each other. A much bigger problem, however, is if a team misses the first tour. It then takes half the tour to find the right level. Last year, with Headrush missing a tour, the format was sensibly altered to accomadate this. Just to explain the Swiss, which I only propose playing on the Saturday morning: 1) Each time you win a game you get a point. 2) Each time you play you play someone with the same number of points. So, by the third round in a 32 team tournament, there will only be 8 teams with 2 wins. By the end of the third round there will be 4 teams with 3 wins, and 12 with two wins. If we made the games half an hour then, each team has only played 1.5 hours. One can then form groups for the rest of the weekend from there (perhaps with a crossover of longer length). Game length can then be adjusted upto a full 2 / 1.5 hours. Top teams only spend 1/2 an hour playing a weak team. 1/2 an hour playing a top 16 side. Its not that much really, and it allows flexibility over a tournament as opposed to over a set of tournaments. Tim Ro-Sham-Bo