The other scenario would be if you’re not randomly selecting games and allowing each group to select their own. Placing yourself in the first group then potentially gives you the widest selection of available games.
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Valid points, both situations. I see it must be a little tweaked regarding how the groups and games are chosen.
How are you assigning players to groups in the official CH tournament, @kdeangelo?
And how would A D20 best be used?
Last year I had a deck of cards that I wrote everyone’s name on, shuffled, and dealt out the groups. Drawing out of a hat would’ve been the same. The D20s were used to determine position in groups along with game selection, and rolling a 20 gave you both position and game choice. This method is fine for 24 players or so but becomes far too cumbersome with larger groups as I discovered last year with 39 players.
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For those interested, I’ve been revealing the Match Play deck via my upcoming tournament’s Facebook event page. I’ll post all of them here after running through all 20 there, up to #11 now. Cards were expertly designed this time around by @jay, can’t thank him enough!
For now I’ll just put this one, my favorite card, here since I’ve already shared it with far too many people (and it’ll be seen at ReplayFX/Pinburgh) 
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Bwahahahaha. Yeeeeeesssss
LOLOL!!!
Does this immediately end and invalidate the round too?
No, round continues as-is. Game is only removed after the round completes.
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Will you have decks for sale at pinburgh? Sorry if that was mentioned already.
Unfortunately no, not of the match play set. I do have 2 sets 1 set of 3-strikes decks available.
will you be selling them eventually?
Yes! My test decks just came in. Will be ordering a large batch soon and have them available just before/after my tournament.
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Question about the game/order selection. The proto-guide mentions using D20 rolls for this stuff. Does that mean have the 4 members of a group roll D20 and play according to the number they get (like, lowest first, next highest, etc?) With roll offs for ties? Or something different?
Have you used the dice for game selection also?
You don’t have to use D20 rolls but yes, that’s how I’d run it with a smaller group. All 4 players roll, highest number gets choice of game or position. Rolling a 20 gets you both. Do another roll to break any ties.
Of relevance to Critical Hit organizers. In MatchPlay you can now move players between groups (it’s not yet possible to remove a group completely or create a new group from scratch). Details: Match Play Events Open Thread
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Going to be running my first 3-strike tourney here in San Francisco on Labor Day - any other best practices folks have? I listened to the Buffalo Pinball podcast as they discussed their experience running one and just wanna be prepared (excited that I can use @haugstrup’s new feature in MP!)
All Match Play Edition cards have been revealed. Decks have been ordered and I should have them available early/mid September. Purchase link will be posted here once ready.
Still plenty of spots available for my tournament in Van Nuys. I’ll be posting a registered player list soon. iepinball.eventbee.com
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Just ran our first 3-strikes tournament and it was fun but ran LOOOOONG. Some of that was the machines not being super hard so like on Spider-Man we had a game go over an hour (everyone had over 200M). Can’t wait to see the Match Play cards and how it goes.
Anyone else who’s run the 3-strike. How long has your tourneys run? And anything you did to speed things up?
I’ve added some notes on questions we had in the Google Doc Tournament Director’s Guide too since some scenarios are a bit confusing on what trumps what and how long things last etc. as far as the various powers each card had.
I ran a 3 strike with 12 people with some custom rules, and it took 3 hours.
I gave everyone 3 cards to start. If you got last on the game you played you got to get another card. Other than that, we played pretty standard. My games don’t play long, so that’s wasn’t an issue. Took time to get rounds going due to people not being familiar with the game, and also there were times that 4,5,6 people got into a back and forth playing lots of cards. Not sure if we did that right to be honest. Haha
3 strikes head to head or group 3 strikes? There is always around 10-12 rounds for 3 strikes, if you have long playing game and good player on them, averaging 45 minutes per round things could run for an hour…
MatchPlay is not better except that you control the number of round up front. If you dedicated to do a 10 round of matchplay (qualifier + finals) it would be the same length as 10 round group knockout.
Setting up the games hard if you can or else removing long game from bank when possible is a way to streamline. Best run tourney like these on quick playing EMs and SS machines 