First of all, pre-registration for GNT is live. We will be updating the list of pre-registered teams regularly on gnyba.org/gnt.
There are three major changes to the conditions this year compared to last year:
Swiss Winners Do NOT Choose KO Opponents
In most KO formats that begin first with a qualifying swiss, the top seeded team would have some choice of opponents in the first round of the KO phase.
We have found that providing said choice adds to the overall stress levels for both organizers and players, with dubious benefits to any team, including the ones supposedly receiving an advantage of having the choice. Having any decision also places actual duties of consequence to the captains of each team beyond the already large burden of finding suitable KO dates for 8-12 players and a director.
This year, there is no choice. KO matches will always be done based on the Victory Point results of the swiss, including byes when the number of qualifying teams is not a power of 2.
More DIC Discretion for Number of Boards
Previously we mandated a minimum of 48 boards for the qualifying swiss, which works well for familiar formats such as 6 rounds of 8 or 7 rounds of 7. However, the directors would be stuck choosing 5 rounds of 10 in the case of 6 teams showing up, which might be overkill in lower flights. The director and all players should reasonably expect to end their day playing at most 3 hours per session, meaning 7 rounds of 6 or 5 rounds of 8 are valid formats.
Qualifying 6 teams from 12, 7 teams from 14
Last year cut 12 teams down to 4 in Flight B. While that allowed for a short and sweet KO phase, eliminating almost 70% of the teams on the first cut is not reflective of the actual GNT event in the national finals — the event has always been more of a KO than a swiss. We will bring back 12 teams qualify 6 and 14 teams qualify 7, 16+ qualifies 8.
However, 11 teams will still qualify only 4. In prior years we allowed a KO bracket of 5 teams where spots 4 and 5 played a wild card match — not happening this year.
