Hi Stu,
Just saw the final brackets. Seems like someone manipulated this draw. How can all 4 past champions, plus eckert, Appleton and fulcher end up in one side? The lower bracket has only mika and hatch who really know how to play this game. Something is rotten in Denmark. Am I crazy?!?!?!
I think the legitimacy of the draw is pretty much separate from whether you're crazy or not.:grin:
The knock-out bracket is here:
Knock-out Phase
The group-phase chart is here:
http://www.insidepoolmag.com/World_14_1_Bracket.pdf
The first place in each of the groups was seeded into a bye. There is no good way to determine who is best among those, so there is no good way to seed them so a random draw would be appropriate.
However, I see that there was apparently no effort to separate those who played in the prelims from the other members in their group. For example, if Parica wins his match, he immediately plays against Fulcher who won the group that Parica was in.
Setting up the Group -> Knock-out seeding could be done so that the winner in each group will not play either of the other two players from his group until (possibly) the final match. This is the kind of nicety that is lost on many TDs. In addition, it would be possible to seed the 2nd-3rd places from each group so they would have no chance to meet until the semi-final. Further, it would be possible to do this in a way such that it would be hard/impossible to conclude anything about who you might have to play in the knock-out until the draw for 1sts was done.
If you assign A for first, B for second and C for third in each of the 8 groups, then the knockout looks like this:
5A 7B 3C
4A 1B 6C
1A 4B 1C **
7A 8B 7C **
3A 5B 5C ****
2A 3B 8C
8A 2B 2C ****
6A 6B 4C **
(for reference 6A = 1st in group 6 = Dennis Hatch, etc.)
The lines marked with **** are a repeated match in the first round of the knock-out. The ones marked ** have a potential repeated match in the second round.
I think the result is not distinguishable from a random draw with the provision that 1sts get a bye and first-round matches are all 2nds vs. 3rds.