Seeking clarification - it is my understanding that to be an IFPA event, prelims have to knock out half the people from A finals. Is it half rounded up or down?
As in, if I have 11 people in the event, am I allowed to have 5 or 6 go to finals?
Not exactly – the <= 50% advancing to finals is a requirement in order to count meaningful games played in an indirect qualifying process.
If you do Herb qualifying with 11 players, and take 6 to finals, it can still be an IFPA event if you meet the other requirements (Open, registered ahead of time, finals format is a “direct play” format, etc). You just won’t be able to count the qualifying games nor the # of hours spent in qualifying toward your TGP.
So if I take 5 of 11 to finals, get to count prelims in TGP, right?
This must be true.
I think the real question is what happens if you take 6 of 11 to finals. My guess: There’s no rounding involved at all, so prelims wouldn’t count because 6 > 5.5.
1 Like
From the rules:
“The games played in the qualifying portion of the tournament can be added to the TGP calculation only if that qualifying portion reduces the field of participants by 50% or more. For tournaments where less than 50% of the field is removed in the qualifying process, the IFPA considers this ‘seeding’ and will not increase the TGP.”
In addition, at least 10% of players have to make finals if you’re running a non-direct format such as pingolf or selfie/herb.
There’s no rounding, the rule is pretty clear that it’s less than 50%.
There’s no rounding, unless there’s rounding. The rule just doesn’t make it explicit.
50% seems pretty cut and dry though, the rule doesn’t say half. If it did say half, it would be ambiguous when it comes to rounding, but saying you must reduce the field by 50% or more is unambiguous. I suppose you could argue that they should say .500 so no one can argue significant figures or something because maybe that zero isn’t really a zero, but good luck with that.
RAW, you have to eliminate at least half of the players each round. Not half or close to half, but at least half.
Note that I got clarification on this a while ago- those players don’t have to be completely eliminated, just out of the running for first place overall. You can still run a B division finals or similar with the rest of the players.
I just want to say that I have nothing to add, although if you scroll down to the bottom of the page there is an exemption . …
Any member (current or previous) of the Illini Pinball Association can do whatever they want, and all games will count as meaningful, because the University of Illinois is awesome 
I knew pasting the hell out of Josh for two semesters in 1998-99 would come in handy! Let’s not talk about the other two semesters…
Thanks, we are planning to run B with the non A qualifiers.