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1) A preliminary round is not a patchwork solution. It is standard practice in almost any cup competition to use a preliminary round to reduce the field, rather than arbitrarily excluding teams.

2) It is a long-term solution. It is quite unlikely that BB will go away from its 1:4 or 1:2 pyramid, which means that the total number of teams will not be a power of 2.

The field is not excluding teams arbitrarily. It is excluding the weakest teams, which believe it or not is also standard practice in almost every Cup competition.

Moreover, it is a patchwork solution, because as the number of teams in the championship increases, the percentage of excluded teams, as a percentage, is decreased. This fraction closes down to about 25% pretty quickly. Therefore, you are suggesting a fix that you find necessary for 256- or 1024-team tournaments, and this is why I call it 'patchwork'.

I don't think a preliminary round will add much to 4k and 16k team tournaments. As a matter of fact, it will be a wasted week when countries expand and the Tournament takes closer to a full season than to a half.

I've mentioned before that I am fine with tournament participation not being available to every single team. As a matter of fact, I don't think you can have a reasonable pyramid where your teams will be an exact power of 2, so...

The exclusion is not being done in an arbitrary way. The fact that it is being done when it not necessary, and there is a reasonable and rational alternative which is used in the real world (and now the BBB) makes it an arbitrary choice.

Let me give you an analogy. You have a table that seats 8, and plenty of food. You have 10 people to serve. One solution is to serve them in two sittings. But instead you decide to serve only 8. The fact that you chose the 2 excluded in a non-arbitrary way (eg the two who were most overweight), does not mean that your original solution was not an arbitrary one.

The fact that the percentage of excluded teams is fairly constant has nothing to do with a preliminary round being a patchwork solution. It sounds like you don't understand what "patchwork solution" means.

While the percentage of excluded teams does converge to 25%, it increases as the number of divisions increase. It is 20% in a 2-division country, and 23.8%, 24.7%, and and 24.9% in 3-, 4-, and 5-division countries respectively. (This has nothing to do with a patchwork solution of course).

The USA and other 5-division countries already have a field of 4096 teams and take the full season. The preliminary round consisting of 2720 teams from the 5th division would be played on the opening Thursday of the season.

The tournament would be enhanced by universal participation where advancement is determined only on the merit of winning your previous cup round - not your league record from the previous year. While, it would not matter much to teams in the upper divisions - who would simply face slightly more competitive teams, it would not harm them or be a wasted week.

It would be better to cut off the cup at a full five divisions, and have a separate cup for a 6th division.

That you are fine with tournament participate not being availabe to every single team is simply a matter of your personal opinion. It has little to do with the actual merits.

1:3:12:48:192:768:3072

No matter what you do, you can't guarantee universal participation in the cup. It is a simple fact of life that in 14 weeks you can only have a knockout phase with only 16,384 teams. Kill a round for qualifiers, and it goes down to 8,192. You might sit there and hope that no country will ever grow this size, but at the moment at which a level VI appears somewhere, excluding teams is necessary. That's how it becomes a patchwork solution for me -- use it while it works, and then we'll see.

So yeah, this is not arbitrary. It is more or less necessary, and the fact you don't like the current system doesn't make it without merit

edit: I completely forgot about the double-cup round at the ASG. This changes the numbers a bit, but doesn't change the logic.

Last edited by GM-kozlodoev at 5/11/2008 8:37:53 AM

Personally, I would move the ASG to Saturday so that it falls between the end of interconference play and the start of the 2nd round of intraconference play, and eliminate the double cup round. In countries with 5 divisions, I would move the cup final to the Sunday following the last regular season game. Since only two teams would be involved, this would greatly reduce the confusion that occurs at the ASG.

A 6th division already exists in Spain and Italy (but it is only twice the size of the 5th division).

As I proposed earlier, I don't think that any 6th division teams should participate in the cup. Instead, teams would play in a 6th division cup, which might also serve as a qualifier to the national cup the following season. For example, the 1024 teams that advance 3 rounds might qualify, regardless whether or not they promote to D.V.

There are some interesting points in this suggestion. The problem is that if you have the top 1024 teams qualify, and some of them also promote, that might mess up the number of qualified teams, though I am sure there will be a way to work around that.

In countries with 5 divisions, I would move the cup final to the Sunday following the last regular season game

Which is pretty cool because, there is already an game ;) And i don't like the cup betwenn PlayOff games, because 3 serious do or die games(ok if you take it seriously there are 2, but first game of league final is a do or die for me) in a week are pretty hard.

Last edited by CrazyEye at 5/11/2008 6:00:02 PM