Elwon
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silly old me thought Keith âmayâ not win that one since he went to loser bracket pretty early⌠should have known better! EL WIN!
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Congratulations to KME on the win, an amazing performance.
I have to admit Iâm weirded out by allowing players who did not attempt to qualify, but were considered A-restricted, to play in the A bracket.
How late did the finals run? It looked based on the Saturday bracket that the finals would end at a reasonable time.
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I wasnât there this year, but I do know that they started Friday morning and ended Sunday around 3pm central. Last year the tournament adhered to a strict schedule; day one ended earlier than expected and day 2 ended around 8 or 9 in the evening. This year the two factors holding up the tournament were the fact that losers bracket was best of 3 for the entire tournament instead of just the top 32, and Pinbrawl which did not conflict last year.
I wasnât there this year so itâs difficult for me to judge whether or not it wouldâve been more enjoyable than 2015. In my opinion, the ideal expo tournament schedule for main would be top 32 qualify, qualifying is thursday, friday, and saturday until sometime in the early afternoon, and then start finals around 6pm and go until midnight, finish the next morning with classics finals running concurrently as usual. The big bracket is really cool and I had a great time helping Trent run those finals last year, something closer to a standard finals format though would help any time issues that may occur.
Also add a B division finals (maybe single elim top 16?) and use Karlâs queue system 
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The âAâ Bracket started on Saturday morning at a reasonable hour (10 am ?). B still had a couple matches to go, and the winner of B got the last spot in A, so there was one âpath lineâ that was slightly behind early on. If you didnât want to start a match past 9pm on Saturday night, you didnât have to, but if both players agreed, you could play it. Escher and Bob played their final-4-on-the-winners-side match after dinner around 7:30pm. Escher was then able to go to bed after that not needing to play again. Bob, too, chose to defer his next match on the losers side til the next morning⌠the Zach vs. Joe K. match was deferred until Sunday morning due to some baseball game that was on and everyone seemed to want to watch - LA vs. some other team⌠In all, Sunday matches started up around 9:30 to 10am along with the start of the Classics finals. There were very few conflicts between the players remaining in the Main tournament and those playing in Classics. Escher vs. Zach started around 10am. Keith beat Escher in the final losers side match around 12:30pm. He and Zach played two final rounds that each took about an hour or so. The picture I have of the final four after it ended is time stamped at 2:33pm, Classic finals finished up about 15 minutes later with a dramatic final game on Power Play between Chris F and Fred R.
All in all, I have to say I personally really like the new Expo format. only two tries on every game (9 games in the Stern-a-bank) made the line pretty reasonable all day long, AND most importantly, you only had to do it on Thursday! #EvertGameCounts (sorta) makes every attempt WAY more imortant than unlimited qualifying and you have to really rethink some strategic approches on certain games. There was tons of time to try and qualify in Classics all weekend and it was really nice to have all of Friday to enjoy Expobrawl and then all the show stuff going on - and not have to worry at all about the main tournament. Getting a few byes and playing most of the tournament on Saturday is also awesome, and I would definitely feel comfortable with a 5-6pm return flight home on Sunday next year.
Kudos to Trent and all who helped him because the thing ran pretty damn smoothly. Both B and A finals always seemed to stay on or ahead of time - even with a couple of long playing games (GoT, WWE, and STâŚ) in the mix, so there was always time to wait for whatever game you wanted in your match - which is super awesome. Nothing sucks more in finals than being forced to chose a game you donât really want to play simply because of time constraintsâŚ
Itâs too bad there wasnât any streaming this year, too, other than heroic attempts from @FunWithBonus to do it from his phone, because there were some terrific matches played all weekend long! Congrats to Keith Elwin for winning it âthe hard wayâ! He was low seed the whole time, so his 11 or so opponents were all guaranteed at least 2 games choices against him each match and he went something like 9-1 on WWE and 9-1 on IM and 8-0 on GB, LOL
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I agree that itâs weird. Technically, I think the IFPA rules deem the games played on Thursday as âseedingâ purposes only rather than âqualifying.â So then the question becomes: should A-restricted players be given a free pass to the bottom of the highest finals bracket without participating in the seeding format?
For Flip-out, the answer is âyes,â because I believe it was vetted in advance with the IFPA and published in the tourney rules. So everyone knew what they were getting into. But it sets an awkward precedence.
Pinburgh is similar in giving a free pass to the bottom of A division 2nd day play for A-restricted players, but very different in that those A-restricted players are required to participate on Day 1.
More brainstorming⌠Also for Flip-out, the argument could be made that any player (A-restricted or otherwise) has a chance to win the âAâ main event by starting at the bottom of the âBâ bracket (because the B Champion entered the A bracket). So should they have been placed in the appropriate B division slot and worked their way up from there? And Elwin probably still would have won. 
But that scenario then cancels out one of the main purposes of having a B division finals: to have a separate finals without A-level players.
So that turned out to be a lot of rambling with no real answer/solution offered. Sorry!
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Is that true? I heard Keith talking about just skipping Thursday of Pinburgh next year and winning it anyway
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It would be tough. Only 60 points are available per day and cutoff this year was 71⌠but I think he could do it
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I definitely agree the event was run completely fairly! No question about that. In designing the Pinburgh rules we thought about resetting everyoneâs record after Day 1 for divisional play, but the situation that happened here was one of the key reasons we did not do so. If an A-restricted player somehow missed the entire first day at Pinburgh they would enter Day 2 at a hopeless 0-60
You could âproveâ this by taking the IFPA rating of Keith and then dumping him into a random spot at the bottom of B division and simulating the results based on every other playerâs IFPA Glicko rating that he may have to face. How probable is it? The world may never know since I donât feel like doing that!
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I posted earlier in the thread that Classics ended at 3:47 p.m⌠Adam, I think your time stamp was Mountain Time, it was 3:33 Central.
Agree, I mostly liked the format and the âdonât have to start after 9â clause. The lack of lines for Open [and not-too-bad ones for Classics], added free time, and earlier finishing time were all plusses over prior years. Even the Open-vs.-Classics playoffs simultaneous issue Sunday wasnât too bad. The one thing I would change is to add 2 âjokerâ games, like many European events do, to give you a last chance to fix that weak score or two. So with 9 machines, it would be 20 games total, 2 tries on each plus 2 jokers. Iâd restrict the jokers to not be on the same game.
Iâd like to see some distinction in prize money between rounds eliminated, e.g. pay 17-24 more than 25-32, 9-12 more than 13-16.
The starting time change for Classics from 8 a.m. Sunday to 10 a.m. needed a bit better word-getting-around than it got. But the 10 a.m. time was a big improvement!
Iâd like better Classics games. Aerobatics could have been replaced with one of the 4 (yes, 4!) Sinbads in the show, and that Mars Trek played pretty coin-flippy, too. PP, LC and TZ were fine. Why the %#@%&# canât we get better Classics machines for the tournament when there are always some good ones in the show? Gotta get on Mikeâs case.
Iâd also like to stop having Classics subsidize Open, or at least reduce it. Open should have taken in about $6K (~100 players at $60 a pop), but the total prize money in Open was more like $14K, while Classics only paid out $1900 I think. You know that had to come from all those Classics entries; 96 players with maybe 30-40 tries each on average at $10 for 3 tries works out to about 10K, which would make the math work for the total prize money across both events. Basically, we spent $10K on Classics and got back about 2, vs. $6K on Open which returned 14. So in the future, if it doesnât change, unless you want WPPRs or a Disco-globe trophy, skip Classics completely, play Open and get subsidized.
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