BD,
A note about tournament formats for this season, and an explanation.
Long-winded no doubt, but you should see the amount of discussion that's
gone into this.
The competitions committee are very much behind the idea of keeping a
separate identity for the A,B and C tour - it seems to us that most
people's imaginations have been caught by the divisional structure and
that most people refer to themselves as 'an A tour team' or 'a B tour
team' and so on. The divisions also allow simple schedules to be written
for at least the top 32.
However, for this year, there are some difficulties - of our own making,
I suppose, but we didn't see them coming. For Tour 1, we expected 8
European teams, and took the obvious decision to extend T1 A to 24
teams. This will enable us to run perhaps the best Tour event the UK has
seen, but it has some knock-on effects.
We actually have 7 non-UK teams, but in fact 2 of them are intending to
play the whole tour, and thus are not really foreign teams at all under
the rules. In particular, they'd expect to hold their seed for T2. So
instead of the planned 16 UK and 8 Euro teams, we actually have 19
fully-fledged tour teams at T1 A. Thus, in order to have 3 promoted from
the B-tour for T2, we'd have to relegate 6 teams. That's clearly too many.
Reducing the number promoted is also not appealing, since T1 is not
guaranteed to be well-seeded. And in order to have just our normal 3
relegated, we'd have to promote no-one at all.
The possibility of making A-tour 2 larger is unfair on the TD for the
C-tour 2 and Women's who would lose 4 teams' cash - significant money.
So we've taken the decision that Tour 2 (with A&B co-located) will be a
32-team format with some crossing over possible around what would
normally be the A-tour and B-tour boundary. This will give all the teams
the chance to find their level. The top 8 will of course remain
peer-pooled - this is an issue around the 16/17 barrier, and we don't
want or need to change things for the top teams.
There is also a similar problem with B&C tour 1 - only 13 teams can get
into that top 32 for T2, and the same things apply to promotion and
relegation as above. To get 3 C-tour teams promoted, we have to relegate
6. And that means those 6 miss out on playing with the top 32 at T2 and
go to a different venue, which is a big thing.
So again, we have taken the decision to remove some boundaries from Tour
1 B&C. There will be a top 8 (peer-pooled), a middle 16 in 4 pools of 4
(across the important 9-24 bracket that determines getting into the top
32 for T2) and a bottom 12, followed by the chance to crossover between
these brackets.
Hopefully that all makes sense. And hopefully the big tournament with
all those non-UK teams will be so excellent that it's all worth it.
Cheers,
Benji
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