2010 NAQT HSNCT

[Stained Diviner]

As of right now, LASA is playing Georgetown, and Dorman is playing State College. The winners are in the top four, the losers are tied for fifth. Maggie Walker and Bellarmine currently have byes and are already in the top four. The small school final is Russell vs South Range.

[Kwang the Ninja]

LASA beat GDS and SC beat Dorman. If Maggie Walker beats LASA, they play the winner of the Bellarmine/SC match in an advantaged final. If LASA wins, they play the winner of the Bellarmine/SC match to set up a one-game final with Maggie Walker.

[Duncan Idaho]

Chattahoochee was knocked out by DCC in round three, I think. Or possibly round four.

[vcuEvan]

Maggie Walker wins!

[Whiter Hydra]

LASA beat Bellarmine for 3rd pending a protest. So right now what I have is:

1. Maggie Walker
2. State College
3. LASA
4. Bellarmine
t5. Dorman
t5. GDS

[Important Bird Area]

Congratulations to Maggie Walker, the 2010 NAQT HSNCT champions!

[jdeliverer]

Gov beat SC 380-345 (or something like that) in the first game of a final in which they had the advantage.

[jonpin]

I'm trying to create a bracket for the playoff rounds. Could someone tell me what the matchups for the playoffs are, from Round 4 onward in the loser's bracket? I guessed they were 6-bye, 7-26, 8-25, 9-24... 16-17 but that doesn't seem to check out.

[Unicolored Jay]

I know in round 4 in the loser's bracket, we were against Torrey Pines and cards 13 and 19 were in contention. That helps a bit, I guess?

[mastaloo]

that sounds right; 6 was a bye.

[Stained Diviner]

I tried piecing it together, and I think they adjusted things to make rematches less likely. My best estimate:
6 Wilmington Charter A bye
7 Dorman over 25 Auburn
8 DCC over 26 Chattahoochee
9 DCD over 23 La Jolla
24 Adair County over 10 OPRF
21 MSJ over 11 duPont
12 LASA B over 22 Berkeley
13 Torrey Pines over 19 Solon
14 Eden Prairie over 20 St Marks
15 Stevenson over 17 Centennial
18 Seven Lakes over 16 Hume Fogg
I don't think any rematches would have happened either way.

[jonpin]

I tried piecing it together, and I think they adjusted things to make rematches less likely. My best estimate:
6 Wilmington Charter A bye
7 Dorman over 25 Auburn
8 DCC over 26 Chattahoochee
9 DCD over 23 La Jolla
24 Adair County over 10 OPRF
21 MSJ over 11 duPont
12 LASA B over 22 Berkeley
13 Torrey Pines over 19 Solon
14 Eden Prairie over 20 St Marks
15 Stevenson over 17 Centennial
18 Seven Lakes over 16 Hume Fogg
I don't think any rematches would have happened either way.

Yeah that checks out. So then round 5 the matches I can find from the liveblog are:
5 Georgetown vs 14 Eden Prairie
6 Charter vs 13 Torrey Pines
8 DCC vs 15 Stevenson
Assuming 4 LASA had the bye, the other teams to pair off are:
7 Dorman, 9 DCD, 10 Adair [vs] 11 MSJ, 12 LASA-B, 16 Seven Lakes

[etchdulac]

Assuming 4 LASA had the bye, the other teams to pair off are:
7 Dorman, 9 DCD, 10 Adair [vs] 11 MSJ, 12 LASA-B, 16 Seven Lakes

I am fairly sure that LASA B was eliminated by Adair and Seven Lakes by Dorman.

[Stained Diviner]

DCD beat MSJ, so that makes sense.

[Important Bird Area]

Stats are up.

[jdeliverer]

I emailed a couple of clear errors in the stats to [email protected]. Is that the right place/is there somewhere to report errors/is it worth reporting errors at all?

[Important Bird Area]

is there somewhere to report errors/is it worth reporting errors at all?

Yes, we'll (eventually) get them fixed. Send comments to [email protected]. (We use the errata address for question-content problems.)

[gyre and gimble]

7 Adair County 11-5 0.688 3950 358 33 127 32 14.66 220.7

My intention isn't to detract from their 7th place finish, and maybe Adair County is just really good at buzzing in clutch situations to win close matches, but I want to point out that this statline is a huge anomaly. The 220.7 PP20TUH is the fourth lowest in the top 26, the BC of 14.66 is the 3rd lowest, and the number of powers (I guess this doesn't matter as much) is third lowest in the top 16.

Again, they're probably just really good at situational play, but, statistically speaking, it seems like a lot of teams deserved to place higher. Does this represent a flaw in the card system, at least in playoffs? I think at NSC, something like this would have a much lower chance of happening.

[Kanye West]

Again, they're probably just really good at situational play, but, statistically speaking, it seems like a lot of teams deserved to place higher. Does this represent a flaw in the card system, at least in playoffs?

I don't think it's the fault of the card system that Adair got the place they did. They went 6-4 in the prelims, happened to get packets that were favorable for them, pulled a nice win streak, and only lost once to get eliminated.

I think at NSC, something like this would have a much lower chance of happening.

I think at NSC, a team's playoff performance is affected a lot more by that team's prelim performance than at HSNCT, so in general, I agree with you.

[gyre and gimble]

I think at NSC, something like this would have a much lower chance of happening.

I think at NSC, a team's playoff performance is affected a lot more by that team's prelim performance than at HSNCT, so in general, I agree with you.

I guess the point I was trying to make was that, at HSNCT your placement depends a lot on who you play and the draw you get, whereas at NSC you're guaranteed to play everybody in your bracket so it's less dependent on the draw.

[jonpin]

Again, they're probably just really good at situational play, but, statistically speaking, it seems like a lot of teams deserved to place higher. Does this represent a flaw in the card system, at least in playoffs? I think at NSC, something like this would have a much lower chance of happening.

It seems to be a mix of upsets of their own making, upsets of others' making, and the card system (and by the latter I mean that the playoffs are an NBA-style bracket where matches are predetermined rather than an NHL-style bracket where teams are reseeded each round). A look at their playoff schedule shows they were seeded 56 and had these playoff results:
16, beat (73) MLK
17, beat (12) Walter Johnson. WJ was there because it lost to (29) LASA-B in a game that wasn't really much of an upset. WJ was the lowest-seeded 8-2 team and in fact had fewer PP20 than LASA-B.
18, beat (24) Hoover by 20 points.
There's nothing really shocking to this point, they had a good run to this point. It's the next two wins which are surprising, not because they happened, but because they were against lower-seeded teams than expected.
19, beat (30) Oak Park. Oak Park came into this game with the 10 card because they had upset Dorman-B and duPont in the first two rounds of the winner's bracket.
20, beat (29) LASA-B. As noted above, LASA-B took the 12 card when it beat WJ in round one of the winner's bracket.

If you trace this part of the bracket back to Round 18, none of the seven teams in it were seeded higher than 19 at the start of the morning (including the teams that took the 10 and 12 cards to the loser's bracket), but one of them was mathematically required to make the top ten.
The problem (although one could argue that logistics renders the solution to this impractical) is that while Adair County and LASA-B, seeded 56 and 29 at the start of the day with combined prelim records of 13-7, played for a top-ten spot, so did GDS and Eden Prairie, so did Charter and Torrey Pines, and so did DCC and Stevenson, all seeded in the top 16 at morning's start.

[jonpin]

This is, to the best of my knowledge, a graphical representation of the 2010 HSNCT bracket (file hsnct2010.pdf). In addition, a blank copy (hsnct.pdf) is included. If the same card system is used in next year's playoffs, you can fill it out as Sunday progresses to see who is likely to play who, something which the liveblog demonstrates is currently very difficult to figure out quickly.

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

That's pretty cool, thanks for doing this Jon. Frankly, it's something NAQT should have done anyway.

[pblessman]

Adair County (or another strong-yet-not-top-tier team) going on a run as they did should not be such a big surprise to people. I discussed this earlier in my thread on the "Great Flattening on the Quizbowl World" (http://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10023). In this thread there was some discussion of their seed and the seeds they played as well as their overall statistics being an "anomaly." I disagree, and a closer look at the stats shows that they just had an AWESOME run.

During the five straight games they won in the playoffs they averaged 273.2 PP20TUH against five teams in a row in the HSNCT playoffs- a VERY impressive feat! They also averaged 16.1 ppb, more than 2.5 ppb more than they were averaging in the prelims. Now... 273.2 PP20TUH and 16.1 ppb doesn't sound like State College or Maggie Walker, but it certainly is a team that could (and did) do some damage in the Playoffs. Some comparison values for the first five rounds of the playoffs for PP20TUH and ppb:

DCC A 272.6 16.5
Torrey Pines 273.5 18.6
Stevenson 288.6 20.5

In think people get hung up a bit too much on rankings and name recognition... For example, Northmont and Culver both defeated DCC A this year, yet DCC A finished tied for 7th, Culver tied for 43rd, and Northmont just missed the playoffs. While teams like Adair County don't have a realistic shot at beating the very top tier teams, I believe the times where teams just below the very top tier can reliably cruise through the first few rounds of the playoffs are over- the world is flat.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Yeah, I don't like this rhetoric about who deserves what going solely off of statistics. Yes, Adair County had weaker prelim stats than other people they placed around, and yes, they started out in the losers bracket. So what? They still won 5 games in a row, including four against teams that were seeded notably higher than them. Just because Adair didn't have the best power count or bonus conversion shouldn't damn them from being able to pull off a surprise run, and I think it's unfortunate that so many people seem to think that statistics we compile after the fact should determine placements, and not the actual games themselves. As long as you assume those were fair packets, then Adair deserves accolades for what they did. Otherwise, why hold the games at all?

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Also, I think we may be losing track of this fact because so often we get caught up in discussing the more esoteric numbers on a stats sheet like bonus conversion or whatever, but I will spell it out in case you all have forgotten:

The single most important statistic anywhere in the game, no matter what, will always be win-loss. Your team can have terrible bonus conversion or terrible power count, or terrible anything, but as long as they win the most games, that means they did the most important thing in quizbowl. Everything else is so much less important that I would call those all third tier stats, with there not even being a second tier. That's how big a deal win-loss is, guys.

[Mechanical Beasts]

Well, the answer to your rhetorical question is "to collect the statistics." Obviously, you're completely right--it's silly to say "Adair's ability to win those games was a statistical anomaly and should be discounted" because it's also possible that it played worse than its ability in the prelims, and we simply don't know which is the case for sure. It's not incorrect that any system where you play a specific team on each finite-length packet is going to be flawed. Perhaps team x is worse than team y at every topic t except the specific tossup answers that come up on that packet. Is team x better? No. Do they win? Certainly. (And this would go for playing every team at once, Goldfish-style, on a finite-length packet, for the same reason, minus the fact that matchup-specific inaccuracies would become less and less likely.) But those are corner cases, and packets of the length that we have are good enough approximations that we should be content that a team sometimes has a run of good packets in the playoffs (or bad packets in the prelims) and consequently has anomalous-looking results.

Also, Dees, I'd disagree that win-loss is most important--at least for evaluating a team's strength. Didn't we find that bonus conversion had a stronger correlation than head-to-head back when people tried to systematically analyze tiebreaker statistics? It certainly wasn't a strong correlation in either case, but the difference between the two was noticeable. Perhaps Sorice or Dwight have the data still.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Also, I think we may be losing track of this fact because so often we get caught up in discussing the more esoteric numbers on a stats sheet like bonus conversion or whatever, but I will spell it out in case you all have forgotten:

The single most important statistic anywhere in the game, no matter what, will always be win-loss. Your team can have terrible bonus conversion or terrible power count, or terrible anything, but as long as they win the most games, that means they did the most important thing in quizbowl. Everything else is so much less important that I would call those all third tier stats, with there not even being a second tier. That's how big a deal win-loss is, guys.

In the same rounds that Adair County played Walter Johnson (43), Hoover (27), and LASA B (11), Wilmington Charter had to play Stevenson (11), Torrey Pines (7), and GDS (5). As a result, Adair County placed ahead of Charter. Charter's case is merely corroborated by their strong stats: the real problem is that, although Adair County performed remarkably, their road was significantly easier than that of their peers. Because of this kind of result, the NSC's playoff brackets are preferable by far to the double-elimination system employed at HSNCT.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Bonus conversion is a better statistic to try and figure out purely what team knew the most after the fact. However, that is frankly an ultra unimportant thing to find out compared to finding win-loss records the day of. The rhetoric I'm seeing here basically is that, because Adair County's statistics got processed through a magical HSNCT placement calculator that Stephen Liu created and didn't output a projected 7th place, that means that some other team is "more deserving" of 7th place than them, completely ignoring the amazing fact that Adair County managed to pull off a string of continuous upsets. The fact is we play the games so that people can win or lose them, not to find out which team does the best on bonuses, and then we use that win-loss criteria to deteermine winners. Hence, when it comes to tournaments, it is by far the single most important statistic on an SQBS output. If people are coming on here and honestly thinking that we can look at a bonus conversion or a power count or a PPG and somehow use those statistics to determine where every team deserves to place, and then call everything else an anomaly and cheapen the results, then you are dead wrong. Adair County won the games they needed to over some high performing teams, who themselves pulled off some good upsets, and that is the sole criteria in determining whether their placement was fair.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

In the same rounds that Adair County played Walter Johnson (43), Hoover (27), and LASA B (11), Wilmington Charter had to play Stevenson (11), Torrey Pines (7), and GDS (5). As a result, Adair County placed ahead of Charter. Charter's case is merely corroborated by their strong stats: the real problem is that, although Adair County performed remarkably, their road was significantly easier than that of their peers. Because of this kind of result, the NSC's playoff brackets are preferable by far to the double-elimination system employed at HSNCT.

I disagree that what you're saying means Adair should be knocked out. Wilmington Charter did well on day one and thus made the more competitive bracket, while having an extra loss and a free win built in to their schedule. Adair County didn't do as well, and as a result of their poorer stats they got a much lower seed, and had a built in loss already, and had to play more games to do as well. They then managed to not drop that single game despite playing very good teams, something Wilmington was unable to do despite having advantageous seeding. I don't think double elimination is an ideal setup at all, but for this particular case, I don't see why it is so unreasonable to put a low seeded team in the position that Adair County was in with their schedule, while giving a much more advantaged Wilmington Charter team stronger opponents, based on their seeds.

[Stained Diviner]

Also, if you're going to compare roads, it is significant that one team got two byes and a loss while the other team won all of its matches. It's also a little odd to compare teams by final rankings--one of the reasons that GDS and Torrey Pines had high rankings were that they defeated Charter, and the main reason Adair's opponents' final rankings were not as high is that they lost to Adair.

It's difficult to compare formats--there's more luck involved with the HSNCT format than the NSC format, but that's largely a byproduct of having more teams. HSNCT has more playoff teams than NSC has teams.

Basically, Charlie is right. Adair had to beat a bunch of teams that had done some damage--LASA B won its first match in the top bracket and two more in the bottom bracket, and OPRF won its first two in the top bracket.

[cvdwightw]

This is, to the best of my knowledge, a graphical representation of the 2010 HSNCT bracket (file hsnct2010.pdf). In addition, a blank copy (hsnct.pdf) is included. If the same card system is used in next year's playoffs, you can fill it out as Sunday progresses to see who is likely to play who, something which the liveblog demonstrates is currently very difficult to figure out quickly.

Jon, that's awesome. One potential caveat is that due to the vagaries of the card system you will not always end up with the same number of playoff teams. For instance, in a 192-team card system you will have the following (assuming the card system I designed is equally efficient to the pre-2010 NAQT one):

0-1 10-0 teams
0-4 9-1 teams
4-12 8-2 teams
17-27 7-3 teams
35-44 6-4 teams
Total: 70-74 playoff teams

The reason for the variance in the number of playoff teams is that in the 192-team system there are 0-2 last-round matches that feature a 6-3 team playing a 5-4 team (one of the four teams involved in those two matches is a 6-3 team, but we can't a priori determine how many of the other 3 are 6-3 and how many are 5-4) and 0-2 matches that potentially feature a 5-4 team playing a 4-5 team (one of the four teams involved in those two matches is 5-4, one is 4-5, and the other two's records can't be a priori determined). Similar arguments account for the variance in the number of teams with each record.

[jonpin]

This is, to the best of my knowledge, a graphical representation of the 2010 HSNCT bracket (file hsnct2010.pdf). In addition, a blank copy (hsnct.pdf) is included. If the same card system is used in next year's playoffs, you can fill it out as Sunday progresses to see who is likely to play who, something which the liveblog demonstrates is currently very difficult to figure out quickly.

Jon, that's awesome. One potential caveat is that due to the vagaries of the card system you will not always end up with the same number of playoff teams. For instance, in a 192-team card system you will have the following (assuming the card system I designed is equally efficient to the pre-2010 NAQT one):

Yeah, I left some open spots because I wasn't sure how many teams was the maximum. If you look at the blank, there's room for up to 40 teams in the winner's bracket, and room for teams all the way down to #80 in the loser's bracket (this year it went to 34 and 75).

[matt979]

EDIT: I see Jon has already reverse-engineered exactly what we're talking about here. The file that I've used for Sunday pairings for the past N years (where N >= 2) anticipates that Round 16 begins with up to 40 winner's bracket teams and up to 48 loser's bracket teams. We actually expect somewhere in the mid 30s of teams to go 7-3 or above, with a wide possible range of 6-4 teams. I have some Monte Carlo results, based on this year's Saturday card system, that I could share later tonight if people are interested.

Incidentally, the uncertain # of both 7-3+ teams and 6-4 teams is why, starting this year, we posted the Round 16 pairings while having the printed cards just show Round 17 onward. (For one thing, once in a blue moon the simulations gave us 49 teams at 6-4.) Otherwise, if you have a card 35 that starts in the winner's bracket, but it's about equally likely that the winner's bracket will have (say) 35 teams, there's no obvious answer to the question of whom card 35 (pre-printed cards) should face in round 17.
END OF EDIT:

I'm trying to create a bracket for the playoff rounds. Could someone tell me what the matchups for the playoffs are, from Round 4 onward in the loser's bracket? I guessed they were 6-bye, 7-26, 8-25, 9-24... 16-17 but that doesn't seem to check out.

I believe https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key ... li=1#gid=0 can now be viewed by anyone. This contains most of the information that was printed out and posted on-site. (The printed-and-posted version includes Round 16 assignments by game room, but is on my computer at home.)

The slight tweak in Round 18 winner's bracket game room assignments (not the pairings, just the game room assignments) reduces the extent of same-ream, same-reader.

In Rounds 19-20 the loser's bracket assignments aren't precisely what the card #s would suggest (for example, Round 19 has 7-25 / 8-26 instead of 7-26 / 8-25) , simply as a matter of reducing (avoiding?) intra-Sunday repeats. An analogous tweak happens in the standard 8-team double elim.

In theory the form of display (bracket vs. square grid of rooms & rounds) is a separate issue from the actual pairings. That is, I think the same Sunday card system could be expressed in bracket form (I infer that it already has been), though I can't say that I see the benefit from spending the time to do so.

(If someone has written a script that automatically expresses this same data in bracket format, I'd love to learn more.)

There might be more to say about the playoff schedule (certainly more to read, in either this or the other thread) but I'm running late to a meeting at my real job.

[matt979]

If they turned in an end-of-day record card with a contact number, and there is a discrepancy, they should've gotten a call. Can't offer any more info than that.

To elaborate on the (essentially true) statement above:
If any team had turned in an end-of-day record card with a contact number, and there was a discrepancy that we had been unable to find and fix, that team would have received a call.

Processing the record cards revealed four matches for which a clerical error had resulted in the wrong team appearing to win (generally a 100-point mistake, where for example a 265-250 win might be input as a 165-250 loss; ambiguous handwriting is often the root cause). (Yes, 4 out of 1,000 is an anomalously high rate compared to previous years.) After those four were corrected, no team had turned in a card with a record that differed from the revised stats. Of the eight affected teams, at least one did not turn in a card (either the moderator forgot to hand it out, or they forgot to return it, or the card got lost). I called that team, just in case they had relied on the initial (inaccurate) standings post, and left a message.

[gyre and gimble]

Bonus conversion is a better statistic to try and figure out purely what team knew the most after the fact. However, that is frankly an ultra unimportant thing to find out compared to finding win-loss records the day of. The rhetoric I'm seeing here basically is that, because Adair County's statistics got processed through a magical HSNCT placement calculator that Stephen Liu created and didn't output a projected 7th place, that means that some other team is "more deserving" of 7th place than them, completely ignoring the amazing fact that Adair County managed to pull off a string of continuous upsets. The fact is we play the games so that people can win or lose them, not to find out which team does the best on bonuses, and then we use that win-loss criteria to deteermine winners. Hence, when it comes to tournaments, it is by far the single most important statistic on an SQBS output. If people are coming on here and honestly thinking that we can look at a bonus conversion or a power count or a PPG and somehow use those statistics to determine where every team deserves to place, and then call everything else an anomaly and cheapen the results, then you are dead wrong. Adair County won the games they needed to over some high performing teams, who themselves pulled off some good upsets, and that is the sole criteria in determining whether their placement was fair.

Like I said before, I wasn't implying that just because Adair had lower stats they shouldn't have placed as high as they did. I guess I used a poor choice of words; "deserving" is really the wrong word to use there. All I meant was that, some other teams that, according to the numbers, were at a skill level close if not better than Adair County's might have gotten 7th if they had Adair's draw. This isn't a dig at Adair or anything along that line. You could say the same about Torrey Pines. Say we played DCD instead of Charter in the game for 7th, since we both had a playoff loss going in. I'd say from the stats that we probably would have lost, although like Adair we could have hit a good packet and won.

Just to clarify, I think Adair County fully deserves its placement at HSNCT, and sorry if I offended you Charlie. Honestly though, looking back at my rhetoric I don't think it can be easily construed to mean that we should "call everything else an anomaly and cheapen the results."

[matt979]

In the same rounds that Adair County played Walter Johnson (43), Hoover (27), and LASA B (11), Wilmington Charter had to play Stevenson (11), Torrey Pines (7), and GDS (5). As a result, Adair County placed ahead of Charter. Charter's case is merely corroborated by their strong stats: the real problem is that, although Adair County performed remarkably, their road was significantly easier than that of their peers.

Just to be clear: Adair County was in the loser's bracket for those games, and thus the opponents in question had those final standings positions precisely because Adair County defeated them.

Given that Wilmington Charter was in the winner's bracket those same rounds, regardless of whether you think Adair County's road was "significantly easier," I suspect that round for round, most coaches would rather have had Charter's opponent and position (one loss to give) than Adair County's opponent and position (brink of elimination).

[Rufous-capped Thornbill]

Plus Charter had beaten Torrey Pines on Saturday. I don't see why this is a big deal. Adair won the games they had to. It's not like they got to choose who they played.

[gyre and gimble]

Plus Charter had beaten Torrey Pines on Saturday. I don't see why this is a big deal. Adair won the games they had to. It's not like they got to choose who they played.

It isn't a big deal. I was just raising a question about playoff structure in general.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Plus Charter had beaten Torrey Pines on Saturday. I don't see why this is a big deal. Adair won the games they had to. It's not like they got to choose who they played.

You're kind of missing the point. We're not arguing over some nebulous concept like whether Adair "earned their placement" or whatever--it's pretty obvious that Adair had a great day and played better than anyone could have expected. That doesn't mean, however, that Adair should end up ahead of teams with a more difficult path than theirs. Like, Torrey Pines and GDS are undeniably tougher teams to beat than LASA B, and in this case, Charter really got screwed over by the card system, whatever "advantage" people may claim they had.

[Dan-Don]

Does anyone from NAQT know when the recorded matches will be available for listening?

[Adventure Temple Trail]

They won't be. I played in what was meant to be in the podcast room once or twice this year; the microphones were broken and in apparent need of soldering to repair, which didn't happen. (This is also why there weren't any microphones for the last few games in the ballroom, forcing us to PROJECT from the stage.)

[Dan-Don]

They won't be. I played in what was meant to be in the podcast room once or twice this year; the microphones were broken and in apparent need of soldering to repair, which didn't happen. (This is also why there weren't any microphones for the last few games in the ballroom, forcing us to PROJECT from the stage.)

Well that's never a bad skill to practice. And I guess Bentley wasn't there?

[Joe Romersa]

They won't be. I played in what was meant to be in the podcast room once or twice this year; the microphones were broken and in apparent need of soldering to repair, which didn't happen. (This is also why there weren't any microphones for the last few games in the ballroom, forcing us to PROJECT from the stage.)

Does that explain the random loud noises in the ballroom game rooms on saturday morning?

[marnold]

You're kind of missing the point. We're not arguing over some nebulous concept like whether Adair "earned their placement" or whatever--it's pretty obvious that Adair had a great day and played better than anyone could have expected. That doesn't mean, however, that Adair should end up ahead of teams with a more difficult path than theirs. Like, Torrey Pines and GDS are undeniably tougher teams to beat than LASA B, and in this case, Charter really got screwed over by the card system, whatever "advantage" people may claim they had.

To quote Sorice: laffeaux. "It's not that we're saying they didn't earn their placement, but man it sure does suck they placed ahead of teams that actually deserved it!" First, comparing Charter's game with GDS to any of Adair's games is obviously wrong: Adair's game against an easier team than GDS in round 18 was because they were playing a team in the loser's bracket and Charter was playing a team in the winner's bracket. That LASA B is worse than Torrey Pines is true, but, like, someone was going to be playing one team and someone was going to be playing the other. The card system is a marvel and works quite well, and is obviously a necessity for a tournament on the scale of HSNCT. If you want to play a national championship tournament run on a small enough scale that all teams can play round robin playoff brackets, I have some good news: you will be in mere hours. If you don't understand the advantages of having a national championship format that can accommodate more than 64 teams at the expense of this massive injustice (of one place) inflicted on Charter, I'm not sure what to tell you.

[mastaloo]

yeah, it's really not a matter of the way the cards fall, it's what you do in the match. we could've played better on sunday, and I for one don't feel slighted at all.

[btressler]

Sigh. We manage to be controversial even when losing. When Torrey Pines walked into that playoff round, I knew that our previous match had caused Torrey to be ranked lower than they deserved, which in turn caused the Sunday playoff rematch.

I said this in the other thread:

I miss the days where we could reseed between rounds. In their last match, two strong 7-2 teams (Torrey Pines and us) had to play. This caused Torrey Pines to be the top 7-3, but with way more points than several 8-2 teams. There are similar sharp jumps at the other records too and I think the reason is that we don't reseed at any point.

We used to reseed before round 9 and round 10, back when the tournament was a more manageable 96 teams. And some combination of rounds 6,7, and 8 were reseeded or delayed matching.

If we can't reseed on Saturday due to the size of the tournament, then how about sometime around round 19? By then the tournament has gotten smaller and we could rebracket. (With the stipulation that teams don't play twice on Sunday unless they have to.)

On the other hand, some people probably like the bracketed playoff for its lack of waiting while the seeds are calculated, as we used to wait 15-20 minutes between rounds.

[jagluski]

They won't be. I played in what was meant to be in the podcast room once or twice this year; the microphones were broken and in apparent need of soldering to repair, which didn't happen. (This is also why there weren't any microphones for the last few games in the ballroom, forcing us to PROJECT from the stage.)

Does that explain the random loud noises in the ballroom game rooms on saturday morning?

No. That was convention center sound system error, which we worked to fix as soon as it was reported. Apologies for that.

[jagluski]

They won't be. I played in what was meant to be in the podcast room once or twice this year; the microphones were broken and in apparent need of soldering to repair, which didn't happen. (This is also why there weren't any microphones for the last few games in the ballroom, forcing us to PROJECT from the stage.)

Well that's never a bad skill to practice. And I guess Bentley wasn't there?

He was not. And sorry about the microphones not working; I know it would have been a better experience for the audience if they were working. We'll try to get this right next year; it was just too late to fix it once we found out they weren't working.

[Kyle]

We used to reseed before round 9 and round 10, back when the tournament was a more manageable 96 teams. And some combination of rounds 6,7, and 8 were reseeded or delayed matching.

If I remember correctly, in 2005, when the field had 96 teams, there was a card system for the first five rounds, then swiss pairs by two rounds (i.e. after round 5, your opponents were set for rounds 6 and 7), then reseeding for round 10. I remember being told, however, that the most important thing was to make sure that the teams with 5-4 records were seeded properly, since those were the teams still fighting to make the playoffs. I seem to remember being told that the pairings for everybody else weren't done all that carefully. At least, it seemed like there was a sense even then, when the tournament was smaller, that the important thing on the first day was just figuring out who was going to qualify for the second day, and that the seeding ultimately wouldn't matter all that much.

(Of course, seeding can't have mattered that much, since the 36th-seeded team of one of my future teammates promptly beat the 3rd-seeded team of two of my future teammates. How awesome would it be to go back and watch that game? I bet Andy swore a lot during it.)