Honest question here. If you go every year and you know you are going, why not get your entry in well before the deadline?
Hey rexus. I appreciate your care in phrasing this in a conversational way. Given the context many questions come across quite disdainfully, almost as if the questioner is thinking "How could you let this happen, I would never let this happen to me, I am smarter than everyone and get things done right so had I been in their circumstances I would certainly have avoided whatever they are facing, let me grace them with my wisdom and share how a sophisticated thinking player would handle the situation so that maybe their pathetic life will be one step closer to the glory that is being me".
Seriously. I regret posting here often. A lot of people make me sorry about humanity.
But you ask a fair point! I have thought about this since I posted this and can boil it down to a couple of things.
The biggest one is a lack of sense of urgency. There are things that are time sensitive and things that aren't. For example, if you need to pick up your dry cleaning and the place is open until 8PM, would it matter if you went at 4PM or at 7:30PM? Not really. Not as long as you got there before it was closed, right? So if they closed early one day at 6PM for some reasons and you showed up at 7PM and couldn't get your clothes, would anyone ask "Why didn't you get there earlier?!?" It's like, "Well, I thought they were open until 8PM."
I hear everyone thinking "Well DCC obviously isn't the same!" and they are correct. But my experience with DCC had conditioned me to believe that it was always going to be the way it always was: Long lines of people at the door on Thursday night signing up with no problem. No one has ever been turned away from DCC for a full field in my life and they have always welcomed all comers. So in my mind this was closer to a 'sign up when I can' type of thing.
The other has to do with flexibility. Sometimes plans change, in particular because I travel and split expenses and winnings with a road partner. If we booked every event, hotel, and flight as early as imaginable every event it would result in money lost due to cancellations. A typical routine for us is to identify tournaments that we want to go to, discuss what pieces have to be in place for those to work (i.e. let me make sure I can cover the kids that day, or confirm whether this guy wants to train with me that weekend or not, etc). We are often discussing a handful of tournaments at any time so we just touch base every couple of weeks and move along our pipeline. The last one was 3 weeks ago. We had gotten together to secure entries to other events and we did book the hotel for DCC as well as flights for other tournaments. I don't recall why we didn't sign up for DCC at that moment but I'm assuming he had something pending in his life that we had to firm up before spending the money and making the commitment.
So, in a theoretical world where our calendars exist only for pool, we have infinite money, never get sick, and are just full time tournament signer uppers, yes, we could just stand by and instantly book all travel for all events. In the real world, however, managing a tournament calendar is a chore that involves finding out about tournaments, going through a vetting and confirmation process, and then making all arrangements. When you have children and work and a lot going on and are working with another person in the same situation this plays out a bit differently. And, while this doesn't apply to DCC, many pool tournaments have weird curveballs with their eligibility or signup process that are easy to cause a stumble. I don't know many players who haven't occasionally made mistakes with managing their calendar be it not getting in to a certain event, not being able to get flights that work, not knowing they couldn't play due to their Fargo Rate, having to stay an hour away because the local hotels are booked, and many other little set backs.
I know that most people quit reading and most of the rest are like "Whatever man, play it that way, you snooze you lose, hahaha". That's fine. I'm good. The DCC has changed radically and now I know what to expect for the future. I also see this as a trend so that yes, I will have to commit earlier to tournaments than I have in the past. This will certainly mean that I won't attend every event I'd like to if they fill prior to me being able to make that commitment, but I know the rules to the game and I can play it just fine. My post wasn't whining. I was just trying to gather information to make the best next move. And it turns out that they were able to get me in to the 9 ball so it didn't even burn me this time.
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