DAZZA501:
I may have misunderstood the rules of this tournament the same way Hans has. I thought it was a straight knockout matchplay format. To be honest i think most of the entrants thought it was a matchplay knockout.
Why even bother pairing us with someone when we could find our own playing partner. I've been drawn with someone who's nowhere near my timezone and it's pretty difficult to arrange times to play. If it's strokeplay can't i just play my round with someone on my timezone? Like Hans for example.
Hi Dazza,
Please accept my apologies if anything was unclear. My understanding was that the convention is to set out all the tournament rules in the opening post. I tried to make it clear that we were talking about a 72-hole event mimicking a real Major, with 4 rounds of 18 at 2 US and 2 British Open courses, in which we had playing partners, and no cut, and that we'd play with as large a field of committed players as wanted to enter (i.e. not restricted to 8, 16, 32, or 64 as would be needed for a knockout tourney).
Did anyone else misunderstand what they were signing up for? If you need to withdraw (for any reason), that's OK, just please do it via this thread and not leave us having to chase people. Thanks!
From my reading of other community tourneys, it seems that leaving it up to entrants to find their own playing partner is a frequent cause of a tourney stagnating. I've gone to considerable effort to pair people up based on stated criteria, and on the information provided (which granted, is not as complete as would be ideal). Time zone alone is immaterial: there is a wide range of playing times within each person's time zone. Hence I provided this grid (referenced in the first post) which I asked all players to check was an accurate estimation. We have 11 different time zones represented by our 24 players who can only play at just about every permutation of morning, afternoon, evening, night, weekends only, weekdays only etc. If you have a better suggestion for how to make this work for everyone, I'd love to hear it.
As stated in the opening post, I determined first round pairings with the further criteria of putting people together who won't necessarily know each other: 1) so that our friendships may grow, 2) so that those in the top echelon can share knowledge with the rising players, and may even learn something from them about shot-making with the basic clubs, and that lower-tiered players are highly likely to learn from the very best.
This is my first time running a tourney, and I'm learning on the job. I now know that gathering more specific data on playing times would have made my job easier. Further, I realize that one of the challenges of Mio's summer tourney was that it seemed to involve an enormous amount of cajoling on Mio's part to get players to organize their games. Scanning through our pairings, I see that almost everyone has WallPosted their playing partner or sent a Friend request. That's wonderful! I am counting on people's active commitment to this tourney, and hoping that I can spend a lot less time administrating and more time practicing as we get underway.
That's a mighty long spiel… Now I'm going off to play some golf!
--------------------------------------------
[Opening post has all the rules for the tourney, along with the playing partners, and the link to submit scores. The 2nd post in the thread has examples of the screenshots you'll need to capture and share in this thread after each round]