Love this post, thank you for sharing. A few questions:
How does the elite division work logistically? It covers the entire country so I'm assuming a good amount of travel is involved. How often do they play?
Do the regional divisions play each other? Or is play concentrated within each...
Paying out 5% of the field is insane. That must be a typo, right? Has any tournament (beyond a winner take all invitational) ever come close to such a top heavy payout?
It doesn't. It simply does a web search and summarizes the results. Similar to someone doing 15 minutes of Googling for your name.
Source: I'm the technical co-founder of a AI related startup and I'm working with these tools 8 hours a day
I took a lesson with Filler recently and one of the things we worked on was decision making in various scenarios and it was fascinating to see his judgement and mental calculations at work. He's definitely done the work to train himself to make optimal decisions as often as possible.
He can only do the best he can with the circumstances presented to him. At the end of the day, he won 11 racks to 4 against the #2 ranked player in the world.
Matchroom can do whatever they want and they have him representing USA purely for entertainment purposes. They could and probably would have him playing for Bolivia if it made financial sense. The WPA actually tries to play by IOC/Olympics rules and cares about citizenship, which is why he has...
Didn't look so great against Wei. I haven't rewatched the entire match, but it seemed like she struggled with the expected things: tactical play and short area positioning (e.g. where you need to get within an inch or two of the right spot). With tactical play, it seemed like she played a lot of...
Great place to play. Half the room are barboxes, the other half are 9' Diamonds with 4.25" pockets. I've played several tournaments there, including Matchroom and Joss Tour events. The owner, Holden Chin, is a fantastic player and a nice guy.