[beowulf]

Sometimes when I'm feeling especially masochistic I sign up for one of the ACBL individual tournaments on the hour. The standard of the opponents is so widely varying that you never know who you're up against.

My suggestion is that the tournament should be organized along Swiss lines. The top four players after each round play each other, and so on down the list (trying to avoid having you play against/with repeats as much as reasonably possible).

This way, if you do well (or get lucky) in the first round, you will tend to be playing with better players in the subsequent round(s). As it is, you can be having a great individual tournament only to draw a really hopeless partner and go crashing down to average or below. Of course, if you do badly in the first round, you will probably spend the rest of the tournament playing with those who just learned the game today (or play that way).

Ideally, even the first round could be seeded according to some measure of ability (I'm BBO has it even if it's not public).

I think this would make the individuals a lot more enjoyable for all.

[nige1]

beowulf, on 2014-March-28, 20:13, said:

Sometimes when I'm feeling especially masochistic I sign up for one of the ACBL individual tournaments on the hour. The standard of the opponents is so widely varying that you never know who you're up against. My suggestion is that the tournament should be organized along Swiss lines. The top four players after each round play each other, and so on down the list (trying to avoid having you play against/with repeats as much as reasonably possible). This way, if you do well (or get lucky) in the first round, you will tend to be playing with better players in the subsequent round(s). As it is, you can be having a great individual tournament only to draw a really hopeless partner and go crashing down to average or below. Of course, if you do badly in the first round, you will probably spend the rest of the tournament playing with those who just learned the game today (or play that way). Ideally, even the first round could be seeded according to some measure of ability (I'm BBO has it even if it's not public). I think this would make the individuals a lot more enjoyable for all.

Over a fixed number of boards, Swiss seems the best format for pairs and teams (a good compromise between a knock-out of long matches and a round-robin of short matches). Extending this principle to individuals seems an excellent idea.