We had an amazing 7 brackets yesterday, all with at least 8 players (none of them were small brackets). The high turnout and level of granularity should ensure almost everyone has a reasonable chance of wining, as you are always playing against teams with roughly the same level of average masterpoints as your team.
The directors also do a good job clustering the teams in the event one bracket needs to be slightly larger. In this case, the bottom bracket was the most reasonable place to put a 9th and 10th player, looking at the masterpoint ranges of the field. It’s also nice not to have any 3-way matches, which for whatever reason no one likes.
Compare with Prior Regionals?
That means we had a massive 60 teams total yesterday, or 120 “table sessions” in the bracketed teams, a much higher number than the Spring 2019 Friday number and anecdotally higher than most of us remember in recent times. Are more players itching for teams over pairs? Or is the regional turnout simply much higher? We will sort it all out in the coming days.
We expect the bracket count to drop a bit Day 3 as the concurrent Truscott BAM event begins. However, Sunday should be the largest team day, with 3 flights of swiss – Open, Mid-Flight, and Gold Rush, each in one large bracket paying many overall spots.
Last Spring when there were 3 flights of team swiss, the A/X swiss had 14 teams, The Mid-Flight Swiss 17 teams, and the Gold Rush 28 teams. Can we beat that on Sunday?
Prize Pool Data
For the number crunchers, here are the first place prizes for each bracket, which also lets you deduce the masterpoint levels of each bracket. Remember, Bracket 7 pays has 10 teams instead of 8, which is why the award gap seems so small.
Bracket 1: 26.67 Gold
Bracket 2: 12.37 Gold
Bracket 3: 9.66 Gold
Bracket 4: 7.64 Gold
Bracket 5: 6.43 Gold / Red (67% / 33%)
Bracket 6: 5.95 Gold / Red (67%/33%)
Bracket 7: 5.73 Gold / Red (50% / 50%)
