EPC group matchplay qualification format discussion

As David stated, it’s really a matter of keeping play time down without compromising tournament quality.

As Morten stated, is it really that a big advantage to go second? For some yes, for others, no. Back to the matter of keeping play time down…

Yes, we’re doing two parallell 256 players tournaments – Main and Classic at my place in only two days – this was the only way possible. And in addition, we have the 200+ players Warm-Up group match play tournament on Friday. I think this will be enough for most players considering the options of not having the EPC at all. :slight_smile:

BUT if people are willing to play a few extra hours (in worst case) some adjustment might be possible like doing Single Elimination matchplay (Bof5) after the initial Round Robin to get from 64 to 16 players. We have three hours dedicated to this in the schedule right now and 32+ machines plus a couple of extra (maybe 38-40 machines in total). We just thought more games played (at least 7 in round 2) would be better. Perhaps the higher skilled players would rather take their chance one on one?

ifpa_watching

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I agree that 25% cut is totally fine and even necessary in some cases. EPC qualifications with more than 300 players being excellent example of this. Doing cut to 25% twice in the same tournament is much worse in my opinion.

If you have to cut your field to 25% or less, I think that a limited best game format (Danish EPC) or three day long unlimited ticket qualifying (The Open) are much more fair formats to decide that than this group matchplay format discussed here.

Yet another argument why I don’t like this format: How do you decide the final standings for players who didn’t advance from the qualification round? Probably all the players who got 0 wins in any group share the last place, then the players with 1 win etc?

But who will finish 65th? With this logic it’s the player who got eliminated with the largest number of wins. Or is it all the players that were in a tie-break to advance, but didn’t? Is finishing 5th in your group with 12 wins better than some other player in another group sharing the 1st place with 10 wins but getting last in a 6-way tie to advance, and then only finishing 6th overall in that group?

I think that you can’t fairly compare the number of wins between the groups, since all the groups and their outcomes are different. Most likely all the groups don’t even have exactly 16 players making not all groups having equal number of played games. Therefore even for players eliminated in qualifications another format would serve better purpose to determine what is the player’s final standing.