[cdrane0]

In the Instant tournaments, the players are stratified into three classes, a,b,c. How does promotion or demotion between the classes work?

[barmar]

We save everyone's BBO/ACBL point totals at the beginning of every month. When we're scoring an instant tournament, we look up the points of all the other players from the month that the original tourney was played. For the live player we use your current point total. Then we stratify just like regular tourneys: the players are ordered by points, the top third are in A, the middle third are B, the bottom third are C.

[cdrane0]

Thank you, that makes sense. I can see that with only fifteen players, the actual cut off for each class will vary considerably between tournaments, but can you give some guidance as to how many BBO/ACBL points would be typical for each class? Just looking at a sample of one, it appears that class C can be up to 500 points, class B can be up to 1100 points, and class A is at the master level. Is that about correct?

[barmar]

I checked the last week's results.

For ACBL instant tourneys, the limit of B has ranged from 228 to 38,695 ACBL masterpoints, averaging 2185. C ranged from 43 to 4520, averaging 664. B can sometimes be very high, because stars and non-members are automatically forced into A, and if there are a bunch of them it will push some players with high numbers of points into B.

For BBO instant tourneys, the B limit ranges from 60 to 7100 BBO points, averaging 1119, and C ranges from 10 to 4188, averaging 447.