Boardwalk Open - What be yo thoughts

[Happyman001]

That is without a doubt NC. The ref should have called it.

-m

dear god, ive seen snails humping faster then that. i hope the director wasn't a rated one. if the right some one saw this...

[paulegli]

Thanks everyone for the kind words about this year's Boardwalk Open. As the tournament director for Salle Santa Cruz, I wanted to comment on some of the issues that have been posted so far.

Smart organizers spend a few bucks and get carpet squares.

Excellent idea, we will have some carpet remnants or samples for working the bends in your epees. Dick King brought a crescent wrench and used the hole at the end of the handle quite effectively to correct his weapons.

SME event was, as always, screwed by random seeding. Some of it was unavoidable. There is no cure for really good fencers who come out of the woodwork after years of not fencing. Although I believe the bout committee has some ability to move fencers of equivalent ratings around. It was just mean to have Nat Burke and Keith Lichten in the same pool, ditto for Ordody and Tepedelenlioglu. And then some pools had nothing remotely that caliber, let alone two. How much are the organizers allowed to use common sense to make pools as long as the ratings are the same? I have no BC experience so I can't say. The result was Ordody and Lichten both seeded in the mid-teens and ruined the days of higher seeds in the 16 (not even the 8, dang it). That is life, I know.

The USFA rulebook covers the pools in section o.11 but doesn't go into specifics about how to assign fencers to each pool. There's a page and a half about bout order, though... For the past couple of years, we've been using Fencing Time at the Boardwalk. When we assign pools, our standard practice is to first make sure that there are no club conflicts, then take a quick look at the relative pool strengths to make sure nothing is severely out of whack. We also randomize equal ratings and do not take national points into account. For the most part, however, we take the pools that are generated by the software. The upside of this policy is that pools will be generated consistently by every tournament that uses Fencing Time, but the downside is that a computer is only working from a set of rules that might not apply in all situations.

In the Open Epee event this year, we had 10 As, 13 Bs, and 9 Cs. With only eight pools, it was inevitable that some pools would have two As and almost all pools would have two Bs. You specifically mentioned Lichten and Burke in the same pool, which is correct, but Keith was the only A in that pool of seven: Burke is a B07, and the other B was Diepenbrock. The pools with two As were Ordody/Tepedelenlioglu and Sprowles/Lipp. The full breakdown of ratings by pool was:

pool 1: A B B C D U U
pool 2: A B B C D E U
pool 3: A B B C D E U
pool 4: A B B C D E
pool 5: A B B C D E
pool 6: A B B C E E	
pool 7: A A B C E E
pool 8: A A C C E E

I can post the whole list of pools with seedings and ratings if you like, though the data is up on FRED as well. From the pool results, it doesn't look to me like Ordody or Lichten seeded artificially lower for the DEs due to the pool composition. In pools, Ordody went 3-2, losing to Mehmet (A08) and Flores (C08). Lichten went 4-2, losing to Hutchison (D08) and Burke (B07). I know how it sucks to meet an A in the round of 16 when you're seeded in the top half of the tableau (wait, no I don't, I suck at epee), but as far as I can tell, Gyorgy and Keith just had relatively bad days in pools.

Ok, I didn't want to write a novel here, but this should give you a better idea of how the epee pools played out. Let me know if you have any questions, either here or by email. Thanks to everyone who showed up at 9 am on a Sunday to fence in Santa Cruz!

p.

[teacup]

We also randomize equal ratings and do not take national points into account.

What is the reason that national points are used?

(The Palm Desert Open didn't use points either.)

[mfp]

What is the reason that national points are used?

(The Palm Desert Open doesn't use points either.)

Seeding the Boardwalk mixed epee event using national points would be somewhat "pointless" seeing as (if I recall correctly) only one of the fencers is currently on either the men's or women's senior epee national points list. And that fencer was seeded 1st in the event's initial seeding anyway.

[Purple Fencer]

What is the reason that national points are used?

(The Palm Desert Open doesn't use points either.)

Especially since PDO hasn't been held for a year or so...