So I’m still working on the PAPA Card based qualifying format event that prompted my question earlier, and I had an idea. As Spinal Tap taught me though, there’s a fine line between clever… and stupid. Which is this?
I’m thinking about scorekeeping volunteers, how to get more people volunteering, and how to best reward scorekeepers. I know events usually include an extra hour of qualifying for volunteers, but for an OK player trying to do well at the tournament, that extra hour doesn’t really motivate.
What if there were an extra couple of playoff spots made available to the two highest scoring volunteers that otherwise didn’t make A division? So for example if I am taking the top 20 players into A division, now I am adding seeds 21 & 22, and they are the top 2 scoring volunteers. If this finals were say a single-elimination head-to-head best-of-5, I could even have the 2 volunteer spots face each other first. Or not.
I’m thinking lots of players who wouldn’t otherwise volunteer would do so for the chance at the extra playoff spots, and it might even generate enough volunteers that a shift could be dropped from say 2 hours down to 1.
I feel like a better option is to provide some number of free cards based on time volunteered. Reserving extra spots for people who didn’t perform well enough to earn it feels like it goes counter to a fair tournament.
Maybe you could have cash prizes for the top qualifying volunteers instead?
I think offering guaranteed seeding to the top two scoring volunteers is a bit much. I like JoeTheDragon’s idea better, though it depends on the other volunteer perks you are offering.
Hahaha @cayle remember WILDCARD at northwest champs the first and second year? 16th spot randomly selected from those who show up Sunday morning who didn’t make top 15
One reason you wouldn’t want to guarantee playoff spots to volunteers is because the chances of them getting embarrassed in playoffs could be high, depending on the number of players and their skill level. Small friendly tourney with no points, sure. But don’t subject anyone to cruel and unusual punishment in playoffs if they don’t have the skills to defend themselves. Loosing repeatedly isn’t fun. Trust me.
This is how the APA billiards league works. At the end of each session top 4 teams make playoffs and then 2 more wild cards are randomly picked from ALL of the remaining teams that didn’t make the playoffs.
It happens quite often that the worst team in the league gets a playoff spot and wins a few matches and next thing you know they are playing in the state championship. Dumb.
I was hoping for “reasons why it is bad” to involve wpprs and numbers and such, and after thinking about it overnight, I have a good reason why this is a bad idea:
Bumping someone up to a spot even at the bottom of the playoffs is giving them unearned wpprs. Even if the person in the “extra” volunteer playoff spot or spots flush out immediately, they are still getting credit for 21st and 22nd place (to use my example) in a tournament where they did not earn that place through qualifying.
I was hoping for a no-consequences way to boost volunteerism, but I wasn’t looking to give away unearned wpprs.
So I created 2 arena banks for my tournament. Round one I would like to draw from bank A and round 2 I would like to draw from bank B and so on to keep everyone from getting bunched up in the same space/room.
Problem is that I cant figure out how to assign a specific bank for the round in my test tournament. The options that looks appropriate are “arena banks balanced” or “manually assign arenas”. But when I start a test tournament it does not show an option to select from bank A or bank B for the round?
You don’t want banks. Do not do “Banks”. Under arenas, go into each individual machine and give it a category, A or B. Set tournament up for matchplay, single game per round. Then as posted above by Corey, when you start a round, hit the dropdown box and choose to draw from A or B arenas.
Banks are totally different. For instance, 21 games arranged into 7 banks of 3 games. 3 games are played per round. The program can randomly assign groups to different “3 game banks”.
