Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich Kressly
If I had to take an educated guess now, I'd be putting my energy into how to improve on the one-day format.
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One way to make room for more matches is to interleave the interviews with matches. I've attached a spreadsheet that shows how a tournament of 24 teams (one field), 6 matches can be run with interviews conducted simultaneously with the first 2 matches. I'm sorry to say that it makes interviews even more stressful, but it does shorten the day. Perhaps some interviews could be spread into Round 3.
One feature of the match set-up is that any given team sees
no repeat alliance partners and no repeat opponents (to my knowledge) across matches. This is one improvement that I feel would help the match-ups to be more even, lessening the need for more matches, as our team faced the same opponent 3 times at regionals and the same opponent twice in Atlanta.
The algorithm used to satisfy this condition is based on modular arithmetic. Basically, Round 1 moves from one slot number to the next in increments of 1, Round 2 uses increments of 2, Round 3 uses increments of 4, then inc 5, inc 7, and inc 11. If you have more or less than 24 teams, you can still increment by these values but lengthen or shorten the team list. If you have a number of teams close to a multiple of 24, (48, 72, 96), just change "n" from 1 to 25, 49, or 95 and repeat the blocks. Also, to shorten the day, one or 2 matches could be eliminated.