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BGonline.org Forums
What did Stick do to deserve THIS?
Posted By: WBR Admin (JohnL) In Response To: What did Stick do to deserve THIS? (Chuck Bower)
Date: Monday, 27 July 2009, at 7:43 a.m.
As the original designer of the WSOB Cannes tournament structure, I would like to point out a couple of things regarding what happened with this event.
1) The tournament structure was designed as 3/4 of a regular bracket which would play down to the last 3 (semi-finalists). All losers from the main draw would feed into a progressive secondary section which would be played down to 1 person to provide the 4th semi-finalist for the main tournament. Throughout the planning for this event, it was always assumed that there would be similar numbers to last years WSOB events (ie around 150+ players) so the structure was designed for that number - 192 maximum entrants, with a second structure in place for 384 players if required. Nobody considered that there would be a requirement for a smaller version of this format (upto 96 players). However as we all know now, for whatever reason, there were only 74 runners in the tournament. At very short notice a decision was made to use the 192 player structure and pad the draw with byes. This was not ideal - especially with the large number of byes coming through into the second chance section (there are 16 additional byes added to the second chance section to make a balanced bracket), but was the best solution available at the time and it worked reasonably well.
2) Once the tournament was well under way, I received a telephone call from the WSOB tournament directors saying that a decision had been made so that the losers in the last six (effectively the quarter finals) of the main draw would receive a prize payout and would not be transfered into the second chance bracket as was originaly planned. This is where the three byes in the late stages of the second chance section came from - those slots would have been filled by the losing players from the last six of the main draw leaving a perfect eight players. I did strongly advise that this was a bad idea - my suggestion was that if you wanted to award additional prizes rather than just the top 4 players in the tournament then these should go to the last three losers (finalist and 2 semi-finalists) from the second chance section - but was told that having made a public anouncement as to who would be paid out that it wasn't fair to go back on this. This left the problem of that to do when you have 5 players left in a knockout rather than the 8 that was originally designed - what else can you do but require two of them to play and give the other three byes. In hindsight it might have been better to try to rejig the earlier rounds of the second chance section rather than leave the problem until the last eight round, but there really wasn't time to design and program something better at that stage.
I would like to state that although I know the people concerned well, I'm not directly involved with the running of the WSOB - I just provided the computer software used by the tournament and acted as a consultant regarding the tournament structures. Also I wasn't present in Cannes, so I didn't have much input into the decision making process once the event was under way and had to rely on everything being relayed to me second hand.
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