Wow, sitting out, and asking guys to play like crap are silly anti-competative ideas that will cost you players either way, and defeats the purpose of playing at all.
From my perspective you have two problems.
The first one is that it's an 8-ball tournament. It's not that I dislike 8-ball, (I do), but that 8-ball is a game in which a player of significantly lesser skill simply has zero chance against someone of higher skill. This also makes handicapping 8-ball very difficult, because lets say you have a beginner that you say has to win 2 games, and a C player that has to win 4 games, the beginner still has almost no chance, unless the C player is someone who gets psyched out over handicaps; this is because a beginner, no matter how easily the table is laid out, simply can't run out, can't get out of safes, and certainly can't play safes. The C player can just play wide open knowing he will get several turns. The same goes for B to C, A to B, and Masters to A, though not to the same degree the further up the foodchain you go. Still though, the lower tier players, the onese who make up the majority of the field, and the ones you want coming back and getting better, are going to suffer and not come back. The other thing about handicapping 8-ball is that you can't have enough tiers to make it truly fair, because the top players have to be given high numbers aginst the beginner types, and it starts to take too long to run the thing.
The second problem is that you have no handicap system.
Unless you have a town of world-beaters, you just aren't going to be able to run a scratch tourney for very long before the lesser players give up and move on.
My suggestion would be to make the tournament 9-ball.
First off, 9-ball is going to make everyone a better player, because it's a harder game period. There are also less rules to argue about.
Second, since the games are shorter duration, you can more easlity adopt a handicap system that will allow several tiers without causing some matches to take forever. A 7 to 7 race in 8-ball between two of the best players could take 2 hours. No tourney has time for this. With 9-ball you could handicap 3 to 9, and even two 9s squaring off wouldn't take too long.
Chris Crisman, ran an insanely successful Sunday 9-ball tournament in Chicago for over 25 years because he had a great handicapping system. In fact even though Chris is long gone, the tournament is still going.
Chris' system:
Handicaps 3-9 (2 for absolutely horrid players).
The handicaps were determined by Chris watching the first few matches of newer players, and in general keeping an eye on everyone. You kinda get the feel for it after a few weeks of seeing everyone, so even though it sounds kind of arbitrary, and subjective, it really does work out fairly for those that keep coming.
Players that came in 1st and 2nd were automatically raised one. 3-8 by one half, and 9-16 by one quarter. A 6.5 would still only need to win 6 games to win a match, but if he cashed again, he was moved up to 7 (even if the 6.5 player won; Chris dropped all decimals on a move up, so you never had a guy go from 6.5 to 7.5).
The exceptions come when you reach 9, and was done to save time, because you can't have guys going to all kinds of crazy numbers like 15! If a 9 cahsed at all, the next time he played he was a 9 minus 1, meaning that he still only had to win nine games, but his opponent had to win one less than his own handicap; thus a 9 minus 2 playing a 7 would result in a 9 to 5 race.
What happens if a 9 minus 3 plays a 3? The minimum games to win was two, and in 9-ball, anyone can win 2 games on luck.
Once you attained a certain rank, you were not moved back, mostly because people don't get worse. They may get rusty, but not worse. However if someone came in, got lucky and won, then got moved up, and came back 10 times and didn't win too many matches, they might get moved back down a quarter point; one less game to win, but right back into the frying pan if they cashed.
Other things he did to even out the playing field were: alternating breaks, no three foul rule in effect for players 6 and under, and no jump cues (because what 3,4,5 is going to have one?).
The rules for the game except the exceptions listed above, were the same as those on TV.
The terrific part about all this was, it wasn't written anywhere. Chris had all this and who everyone was, including players he hadn't seen in months, in his noggin, so no one could manipulate it too much, and those that did so, were simply shown the door. The players' handicaps were written down, but Chris remembered everyone's face, name, and stroke. I simply deduced what was going on by paying attention.
In over ten years of playing that tourney (not even close to every week), I saw about 3 people complain about anything, and one guy shown the door; not bad!
