Commenting, not as one who participated in our recent tournament, but as one
who just looked at the chart of the posted results, it is clear that the 2 big
keys to winning our tournaments are:
(1) to not lose a game to any of your opponents,
(2) to win at least one game off of each of your opponents or to come as
close to doing so as possible.
According to the chart, Monroe, the winner, had 16 opponents, 14 wins, and 0
losses. Elton, the runner-up, had 16 opponents, 14 wins, and 1 lost. I, the
third place finisher, had 16 opponents, 11 wins, and 2 losses. Just to put
this in clearer perspective, 14 divided by 16 equals 0.875. Move the decimal
point 2 places to the right and you have 87.5%. In other words, Monroe and
Elton won games off of almost 90 percent of their competition. I won games
off of 68.8 or almost 70 percent of my competition. The one thing that the
top 3 finishers have in common is that they won games off of most of the
competition whiles losing to less than 10 percent.
Now, here's the question. What do you make of these numbers? Based on this
data, what inferences can we make about our tournaments or its Top Master
division? It is my hope that we don't get stuck in the purely negative
inferences! But lets not run away from them, either! It's my wish that we
rally around those inferences that can push us forward and make our
tournaments better, more competitive, and more credible.