This is whats going on in my area's APA CityWide

dooziexx

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Well heres the detail: Our APA LO runs 3 sessions; Summer, Fall & Spring. After each session, the top teams and playoff winners are invited to a tournament called the Challenge of Champions. Winners from the COC will qualify for one of the 16 spots for CityWide. So far from the Summer 05 and Fall 05 Sessions, 6 teams have qualified for CityWide. 6 more teams will come out of the Spring 06 Session. That leaves 4 available spots. Our LO decides to hold 4 Qualifying tournaments with the winner of each tournament getting one of the remaining 4 citywide spots. Each tournament consists of 16 teams and it cost $100 per team ($6400 total for all 4 tourneys).

Heres my beef: To me thats not fair. Teams play their asses off during the regular season, playoffs and COC just to qualify for CityWide. With this qualifying tournament, any team can bypass the playoffs and COC and still make it to CityWide. Seems to me its another way to generate more cash in the LOs pocket. And the LO is holding these qualifiers during the spring session. Why not just play in the qualifier and secure the spot to CityWide and dump the rest of the session??

What are your thoughts? Anyone else have this same situation in your APA league??
 
Sounds kinda similar to how my local LO runs things:

Three sessions a year, Fall/Spring/Summer. End of each session, there's playoffs amongst the teams in each division. Top two (or three) teams in the playoffs go to "triannuals" (end-of-session tournament). At tri's, eight teams qualify for regionals (held after summer tri's). At regionals, four teams out of 24 qualify for Vegas.

We don't have any way to bypass the system in our league.
 
Same kind of thing in my league.

last session, the clear cut best team all session long turned around and got knocked out first round by a wild card team who drew a card to get into the playoffs.

You can't tell me that our league sent team to cities (Atlantic City for us). I think that TAP league I shoot in does it right; They give the highest point total a bye right to the finals, and IMO, they earned it.
 
Well something I forgot to mention in my last post: Let's say a given division has four teams in the playoffs - 1st-3rd and the wildcard team. Two of those teams go to the triannual tournament. The 1st place team for the regular session *always* goes to tri's, no matter if they get knocked out in the playoffs. So basically the playoffs are to determine which of the other three teams go to tri's (if the 1st-place-at-end-of-session wins playoffs, then 2nd place in playoffs gets the other spot), and also, which team gets "first place" for the session as a whole (a bit of cash back and trophies, given out at tri's). A team can take 1st in regular session play and still not be "first" in that sense.
 
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Ours works like this:
Each league plays their regular season (Spring/Fall/Summer sessions). The regular season champ gets $200 for the team. They can use $100 of that to buy directly into the "Tri-Cups" and bypass regular season playoffs, which opens the door for one more wildcard team to enter the playoffs. Or they can try their luck in the playoffs and possibly get knocked out (most buy in). 4 teams make playoffs. The winner of the playoffs goes to Tri-Cups as well.

There are usually 45-60 teams in Tri-Cups and is a modified single elimination tourney where if you lose in the first few rounds you can still move forward. After the first two rounds you are done if you lose. Top 8 teams qualify for regionals. The further you make it in Tri-Cups the more money you win. My team won for $1600 this past session.

Then regionals is 24 teams (8 from each of the 3 sessions) and is a true double elim tourney. I think the top 6 or 8 teams went to Nationals last year. Last year we had a Bye and then won two straight matches and were in the top 6 so we didn't have to finish the tourney and got our trip to Nationals.
 
randyg said:
Sounds like APA.

Sounds like you have experience dealing with this. My entire former APA team is now a TAP league team.

I still play on another APA team, but I also have low expectations, that way I won't be disappointed in the end.

I am one of the few who say I want to have a good time on league night, and act that way, too.
 
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