IntroductionThis is the first of what will likely be a series of new tournaments, sponsored by those virtually wandering New Yorkers currently camped out at Herrill Lanes. We are doing this because:
1) we need to firmly establish the principle that the person running the tournament is fully accountable to those playing in it. Call it a Player Bill of Rights. You would think that it would just be common sense that a gamerunner needs to tell the participants about his decisions and rule changes, but common sense isn't so common.
2) due to the huge drop in Buzztime locations, many areas in our country now have no place to physically play. We wish to demonstrate that regulated remote play is no threat to tournament play.
3) we want to try some new and different ways to play tournaments, trying different ways to play, including different games to play and trying different ways to award winners. What we especially want to try is having you tell us what you think and want.
4) we'll do some housekeeping by setting forth and detailing in writing many of the unwritten practices that have emerged over the years and including them into a set of rules. It will be rather longer than what you're used to, but this is something that you do once and refer to whenever necessary, which probably won't be often. This will also help new gamerunners learn what needs to be done. People running other tournaments are encouraged to copy-and-paste any and all of these rules for use in their tournaments.
What's the game?We're going to give you a choice.
The first choice is what we call "March Madness." Like the NCAA tournament, there will be no regular season, but instead seedings. Seedings will be done using the average 2023 Brainbuster scores available at
https://ntn.donrdenton.com/average.php?GAME=brainbuster&YEAR=2023. All matches will be head-on-head, or depending on the number of entries, head-on-head-on-head (three teams play, one advances). Again, depending on the number of entries, There may also be a play-in round for the lowest seeds, like the NCAA tournament. The winner and runnerup will get a cash prize and a medal which they get to keep permanently.
The second choice is what we call "Brainbuster Survivor." Each week, you will play Brainbuster. If your team has the lowest score or one of the two lowest scores, your team(s) gets dropped, and everyone else goes on to the next week. The cycle keeps repeating itself until there is one team left standing. If that is your team, you will get a cash prize and a medal which you get to keep. Past performance does not matter one bit, no dropped weeks, it's all "What have you done lately?"
Why This Way?
It's hard to see the need to play a number of weeks just to establish rankings when statistics on play are readily available. So if you already have a regular season, why not go straight to the playoffs? That's the reason for March Madness.
Brainbuster Survivor is much different than any other Buzztime tournament. It is often difficult to make a Buzztime tournament competitive. The average tournament is heavily stacked against Cinderella. Most of the time, most teams are effectively out of it after two weeks after a few teams build up insurmountable leads, and if all you want to do is figure out who the best team is, just look at the statistics. Brainbuster is a bit different in that currently you usually have about 10-12 teams not too far away from the top score; there's often little difference between third and twelfth. This approach gives more teams the chance to advance deep into the tournament and then hope to turn into Cinderella at the end.
When?Soon, definitely in March, but first I want to hear comments from you about this.
How will this be different than other tournaments?In a lot of ways, not at all. I will follow the Bill of Rights on disclosing all that I do to you all, but I would do the same thing without any new rules. Rules will usually follow general practice, but they will be spelled out in more detail and unwritten practices will be written down. That will make them rather longer than what you've seen in the past, but they will be permanently posted to Scaratings so people can refer to them whenever needed (which will probably be rarely).
The only difference some may find big is that teams that play remotely are allowed to play. As of now, that's only one team I'm aware of: mine. This is not the first tournament in which we played; it is not even the first Brainbuster tournament in which we played. Even if you weren't paying any attention to that, you probably noticed that the world didn't end when that happened. This time around, there will be new restrictions on teams that play this way: your team can only play that way if on average it takes you more than two hours to get to the Buzztime location, you can't bring in anybody and everybody to play with you, and you need to announce that your team in fact does play this way.
One other thing: the winning team does NOT get the right to run this tournament the next year; that has been the cause of our current problems. I will do this as founder the first year, but I would much rather hand this over to someone else for future years while continuing to fund the prize. We will discuss ways how this can be done down the road.
How do I sign up my team?The sign-up period will start when I post the tournament start date in this thread. You will have to say if you team plays remotely, and you will have to say that your team is OK with remote teams playing in this particular tournament.
We know that most of you don't care about these disputes and just want to play. It's fine by us if you also sign up for tournaments like McCarthy that ban remote play, but if you are a team that bans remote play in a tournament, you're going to have to explain publicly to my satisfaction how you hold two diametrically opposed positions at the same time. I will accept medical evidence that you have two faces.
Something else new that we will require is that if you run a tournament (and most of you don't), you have to affirm either publicly or within your rules that you will publicly inform your tournament participants of all your actions, decisions and rule changes. That may be a big "DUH" to you, but we just had a team refuse to do that. We have set up a specific structure to handle this for ourselves, but you need not do all that, especially if this has not been an issue for you. If you do it already, you can just say so.
For now, tell me if you want to play and which game you want to play, along with any other comments. Either post those in this thread, or if you prefer, PM me. Thanks!
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