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I think there should also be a way to fold the people who lose in the Top Cut back into the rest of the field for the later rounds.  If you do a top cut of 8, then there would be 2 rounds left for the first losers.  If you do a top cut of 16, then there would be 3 rounds left for the first losers.  That's a lot of time to sit around with nothing to do unless we can get them back in.

Also, I doubt that any tournament prior to Nats will actually have more than 31 players, so I'm not sure that this is really going to matter too much.

Quote from: Chris on January 06, 2013, 12:55:13 AM

I was thinking double-elimination for top cut, which would mean two off rounds for the people who get cut early, which isn't so bad.

I'd still like to fold the losers back in if possible.  I'd feel badly for the kid who does well early in the day, and makes the Top Cut, but then loses there.  They not only would feel badly for losing, but they would wish they lost earlier in the day instead so that they could still be playing like everyone else.  We don't want it to be a BAD thing to make it into the Top Cut.

1) Rather than a straight top cut, I would prefer an X-# cut. Something where (for example) instead of taking the top sixteen players you take every player who has at most two losses at that point (an X-2 cut). The problem with a pure top cut is that (as long as you use LS differential as a tie breaker) it will retain the a chunk of the strength of schedule and the bad draw issues

Optimally you would have tournament pairing software that takes care of all of this automatically under the covers and not make any publicly viewable distinction between the top cut and the keep-on-keeping-on players.

It is time to begin plugging the Type 2 Only tournament. This year it will be on March 1-2, and will feature even more Wild Bill (if that is possible) than ever before.

True. Unfortunately the current (non-top cut) and proposed top cut formats both use LS differential as a tie breaker, which couples them both strongly to draw randomness. Draw randomness is--without a doubt--the absolute *worst* feature of the Redemption game mechanics.

...if a player that would make the Top Cut instead dropped after the Swiss rounds completed, his or her rating would fare much better than a player in an identical situation that chose to play the Top Cut, but lost in the first round of it. Depending on whom you were paired against, it was very possible you could make the Top Cut, lose your first round, and end up with an even lower ELO rating than you had at the beginning of the tournament! In other words, you could make the Top Cut, but end up with a lower chance at qualifying for Worlds after the tournament finished. Even worse, in most cases, a player with an established ELO rating could win his first round of the Top Cut, and then be eliminated in the subsequent round, and still lose points by playing in the Top Cut. (The player would lose points from playing in the Top Cut, but not necessarily overall.) In terms of rating, that player would have been better off simply dropping after Swiss, even though he or she won his or her first match. In a City Championships with a Top 8 cut, a player with a high ELO rating that made the Top Cut often had only two possible outcomes from playing in the Top Cut:

    1) Win the tournament and gain ELO points from the Top Cut.
    2) Finish any place other than 1st and lose ELO points from playing in the Top Cut.

While the player’s gain from 1st place would almost always be higher than the loss had he or she been eliminated in Top 4 or the Finals, a player that was comfortable with his or her rating sometimes felt it was better not to take the risk.

Additional issues arose from the fact that some skilled players had chose to enter the season later, perhaps skipping City Championships and first appearing at a State or Regional Championship. These skilled players would have ratings much lower than other skilled players who had already built their rating by playing and winning in earlier tournaments. If you had a high ELO rating, playing a tournament with these latecomers was like playing Russian Roulette, take a loss to one of them and your rating would crash. Beat them, and you’d gain very little. Though your opponent may very well be a skilled player, if it is not reflected in his or her ELO rating, your ELO rating will take a big hit by losing to him or her. Areas that had a higher proportion of skilled players entering the season later would, on average, curb the ELO ratings of the highest-rated players. This problem was augmented by the fact that these State and Regional Championships would have a higher “K Rating,” meaning wins and losses would have a larger effect on your ELO rating than at previous, smaller tournaments.

It should go without saying that the constant dropping and sitting out of tournaments combined with the nerve-wracking games against a low-rated opponent produced a less fun tournament environment. (Losing on Turn 1 to a Sableye and dropping 20 ranking spots didn’t seem to please anyone.) The ELO system produced a lot of crazy situations, too. In a City Championship with a Top 8 cut, I once saw a player who finished 11th win the event as three players dropping allowed him to sneak in to the Top Cut at 8th and win the event.

It is time to begin plugging the Type 2 Only tournament. This year it will be on March 1-2, and will feature even more Wild Bill (if that is possible) than ever before.

If a player happens to run into a lot of top players and takes a few losses, they aren't going to make the top cut regardless of tie-breakers.  Meanwhile someone could cruise through easy early rounds and get in no problem.

Quote from: everytribe on January 06, 2013, 10:19:57 PM

We hit 33 one year. The number isn't as important as the quality of the players.

I was wrong then.  And by the way, I did NOT mean to malign the great tradition of the T2-only Tournament by saying that it probably would have less than 32 players.  It is one of the highlights of the Redemption calendar every year, and I hold it in high regard.

I don't think you would need it, when you do to cut it just becomes a bracket style tourney