"Random" Match List Generation

[Sean Schuff]

I've searched the forums for a discussion like this and found none. I'm curious to know if others have noticed this (and I'm sure many have) and what you think of it.

Our team attended the Wisconsin Regional a couple weekends ago and were very intrigued by the "randomness" of the alliance pairings in the quailfying matches. In addition to our own team's awareness of this, many other teams expressed that they noticed the same thing. As an example, our team played four matches in a row with team 525. We played against team 111 three times in a row (won 1 by some small miracle!) and team 111 played against team 494 four times! In our final three matches we either played with our against teams 1714 and 1732, both of whom played on the same alliance for the last three matches.

I'm not sure how the match lists are generated but sometimes it feels like there is a puppet-master working the strings. If the match lists truly are randomly generated then someone needs to work on the sophistication of their generator so there is a bit more mix to things. With 34 teams at the Wisconsin regional we should have played with and against every team there at least once. Instead we ended up playing with our against the same teams over and over again and never played with/against a handful of teams.

I don't want this to sound like sour grapes because it is anything but that. Regardless how many times we played against the WildStang juggernaut we still ended up seeded third and played respectably and we're proud of our performance. It would be nice to have the opportunity to play with some of these teams as well as against them. I can't imagine what it would be like for a rookie team to come in and find the deck "randomly" stacked against them.

Anyone else have thoughts on this or is this regional just a fluke in the pairings?

Thanks!

Sean