(EDIT: The Motion seems to apply only to Regional tournaments, not clubs. Therefore, our NYC and Long Island clubs should not be impacted)
Both Honors and Sagamore have their version of a Life Master / Non-Lifemaster event, focusing on giving newer players a chance to partner and learn from a more experienced player in a fun and casual setting. Someday, we can do comparison between the two.
More time-sensitive is ACBL Motion 193-21, which places restrictions on bracket sizes for any Bracketed Teams event. In fact, our photo last time depicting many brackets is from the twice-annual, charity LM/NLM team game that kicks off the Long Island Regional.
Item 193-21: No more than 2 brackets in an event may have less than 7 teams for the purpose of applying the awards in this section, when there are more than 22 teams in the event.
There must be some background for this motion, (EDIT: it ensures larger brackets for 2 and 4 session regional events, but does not impact clubs). At face value, it seems net positive for paying more masterpoints. By having brackets of size 6, only 1st and 2nd spots pay overall. With normal brackets of size 8, 3rd place also gets overall awards, and with 9 teams, you even pay 4th place. In other words, 33.3% vs 37.5% vs 44.4% of teams leave “happy”.
Unfortunately, Masterpoints don’t tell the whole story. Having a large bracket also causes a few problems. First off, granular bracketing in theory ensures all teams have a fair chance of winning – larger brackets increase the odds one team clearly doesn’t belong in the bracket.
Club events also tend to run only one session. With 25 boards, you can at most squeeze in 5 tiny matches, and more likely opt for 4 matches of 6 boards. A larger bracket should be run as a mini-swiss, which adds more work for the directors, and adds more luck to the final outcome as many teams never face each other. Honors simplifies the rotation by having two mini-round robins of 4, so the team never interacts with the other half of their bracket except to see who has the most Victory Points at the very end.
Lastly, and this is actually an often overlooked problem: players tend to hate 3-way matches. Brackets of 9 pays the highest percent of teams, but requires a 3-way every round. Forget about the delayed gratification of not checking scores for 2 rounds. The 3-way adds a lot more work for the directors and plenty of confusion for newer players. It also breaks the Swiss component slightly. The top teams should be facing off each round, but we’ve all seen teams emerge from a 3-way with two near-blitz victories.