Talk:NAQT finals format
"Regardless of the criticism, the NAQT Finals Format is the most fair finals format for any tournament that insists on having a final to award a champion."
This needs further qualification.
- A system in which a final is played regardless of distance between the top two teams, but the second-place team must continue winning until it has a better record, would be more fair, at the expense of possibly needing to write and play a number of additional rounds that might be considered unreasonable by many people (e.g., a final between a 13-0 team and a 9-4 team could require up to 5 finals rounds). However, since the article is about finals at NAQT national events only, note that NAQT has the unique ability to incorporate unused rounds into the following year's set, something which they in fact do to this day, and that 5 games under the NAQT timing rules should in theory add at most an hour to the schedule compared to 2 games. I believe that some sort of compromise based on this system was being seriously proposed during discussions of the old finals format, along the lines of "let the final extend to as many as 3 games and don't have one if a team is ahead by 4 games; this will add at most one round to the tournament while still ensuring a final in 99% of cases."
- Many large tournaments including local high school invitationals, the 2009 PACE NSC, and the 2009 Penn Bowl used a system in which two halves of the upper playoff pool are kept separate until a champion of each division is named, and a one-game (or, if desired, unweighted best-of-three) final between the two group champions always ends the tournament. There are obvious drawbacks to this approach but it does guarantee that a final will take place and a team will not leapfrog another team in commensurable record by playing that final.
Matt Weiner (talk) 05:51, 15 March 2022 (CDT)
I agree that the original statement needs qualification or is just plain wrong, but I think you're mistaken about how long it would take to add up to five games. If each game consists of two 11-minute halves (per ICT rules), that would add 110 minutes (nearly two hours) even without accounting for any slack (such as for scoresheet setup, timeouts, halftime, possible overtime, protests, letting spectators in/out between games, other brief breaks between games, etc.). (And the ICT already lasts until roughly 8 p.m.!) —Jonah (talk) 08:43, 15 March 2022 (CDT)
It's adding three games, not five - the example talks about running five games instead of the existing two that are already in the schedule. FWIW, it's mathematically possible for the pre-2018 ICT format to end with a team at 13-0 and no other team at better than 6-5, which would require six games for a final in this scenario, but the likelihood of that happening in the first place and the second-place team winning five straight games to force a decisive sixth game is effectively zero, whereas 13-0 and 9-4 is more plausible (though also not likely to end with the 9-4 team winning five straight games; I suspect that it's far more likely that a team whose best player misses their flight and arrives during round 12 sneaks into the playoffs and then is able to rally back, then for a team that is truly 4 games worse than an undefeated team to suddenly win 4+ consecutive games against that team.