tiffer67:Just looking at my last 10 tournaments played, I would say 6 out the 10 have been won by the usual suspects. In a couple they have missed out on countback.
Ten tournaments isn't a big enough sample size.
For example, the most recently filled RG is being lead by a TM, and so is the RG before that, and the RG before that. After that, out of the next 8 RG's, 5 or 6 are being won by legends. From these 10 RG's, it looks pretty much 50/50 to me.
This is why I was attempting to get tiers added to RG leaderbaords... to see how bad the problem is.
Sorry for the edit on the last post, too, but once again, there is also the issue of there being lots and lots and lots and lots of legends out there that will never, ever win a tournament because they were too good (and too honest) to stay TMs, but not good enough to compete as legends. When Angeltotti, shaghar, coolswing, pricehcs, macgillicuddy, thunderbird, ncviz, cyl6, myself, etc. wins a tournament, you are looking at the top 2% of the legend tier. For at least 50% of legends, winning an RG is all but impossible -- they could maybe win only 1 out of 500 RG's that they entered, whereas almost any TM has a 1/50 chance at winning, and if they are sandbagging, more like 1 in 15.
The handicaps are simply too coarsely distributed (i.e. the master->legend jump will absolutely crush most people) and they are too severe. There should be a tendency towards moderation for this stuff. When there is no incentive to buy equipment, become a legend, etc. because you can make more money as a TM, that's a bad thing. Allowing 2% of legends to be thought of as extremely difficult to beat is better than making those 2% somewhat easy to beat, but making 90% of legends unable to compete whatsoever in the process.