[wgardner]

One other strange thing about the NorCal strategy: you have a better chance of advancing if you're at a tournament without a host, which motivates you to pick tournaments without hosts.

In Virginia, the two tournaments that have hosts at least still advance the same number of non-host teams as the other tournaments, so teams aren't motivated to avoid the hosted tournaments. [Aside: If anything, there's a slight advantage with the current advancement system to attending a Virginia tournament with a host, because there's a slight chance that the host team will also be high in the advancement order which results in a team lower in the order getting to advance.]