--My question is this: for the "national" tournaments---ACF, CBI, NAQT, and Penn Bowl---how many matches should each team be guaranteed? Is there such a thing as "too many" games? If so, how many? How many is too few? And how many matches should the winning team play?-- [Disclaimer: this is all written from a strictly British perspective!!] It seems to me that part of the problem lays in the competition structure rather than the sheer number of games. I know from my experience of running the British Nationals that teams prefer to play fewer important games than a large number of possibly meaningless treks. The single field system is definitely weighted towards those teams who have the stamina to keep good performances through long runs of games without any target in sight other than their own win-loss record. Over here, we prefer to work on a "groups" system. This splits the competition into large groups, in which everyone plays everyone. Cross-over matches against other groups are also possible. Careful seeding or allocation can "engineer" some very interesting games this way. Following this stage, a few top teams progress into a brief knock-out stage (no more than eight, ever!). We find that this gives the tournament more structure, and teams have a clear idea of the precise significance of each game as they are playing it. Now before anyone dives to their keyboard to point them out, I appreciate that there are large problems with this, not least that of uneven group standards. I'm not convinced that it is perfect, but I am much more happy with it than an amorphous block of games inflicted on each team. Though I appreciate that this hasn't directly answered the question, I think the maxim should be that the number of games is irrelevant, but the importance is. Although the British Championships are very small scale compared to the US Juggernaut tournaments, a glance at <a href=http://users.ox.ac.uk/~quiz/comp/bc target=new>http://users.ox.ac.uk/~quiz/comp/bc</a> will show how we did it last year. Rob Linham, President, Oxford University Quiz Society, UK.
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