jeffdos924:Were these tournaments not limited to a group of players? .. I'm pretty sure they were... and nobody ever said anything about those.
There's only one Nivlac. His stature on this site is exceptional. To be excluded from his tournament hurts more than to be excluded from any random community tournament.
Yup, it may make one feel nicely snug and complacent listing all the glorious justifications for the exclusion when one is "on the right side of the fence". Those on the other side of the fence will think and feel differently. We had a similar situation regarding exclusions of foreign players from WGT.com tournaments... a number of users from "the right countries" enjoyed reminding "the others" of those folks' supposedly inept governments... until it unexpectedly happened a few weeks ago that several US states have likewise been excluded from matchplay wagering. Suddenly, the complacency was gone and the cold, joyless facts remained. Nothing to grin or pontificate about, really.
So, good luck to this tourney and all players in it! 
It certainly hurts to be excluded, but it's not the end of the world. But please, if you can avoid it, don't rub this in for us, complacently listing all the wonderful reasons for kicking us off this tourney. Non-Masters have been kicked off of it, and that's that. We can live with it, sad though it makes us.