Some big news from BGiE - from next Monday we will be offering 4 completely separate side pools (not to be confused with swimming pools.)
The pools will be £0, £10, £20, and £30, with every player choosing up to two to enter.
The registration fee remains £3.
Everyone will sign up for a guaranteed 3 matches, played in randomly-selected groups of players*. This will give us all the chance, over time, to play all the other players in the club. It will also make signing up easier - just one Hub link to click each week.
How to enter the side pools
If you opt to enter two side pools, they must be adjacent (e.g. £10 and £20 or £20 and £30, but not £10 and £30.) Of course you can enter just one side pool if you prefer and if you don’t want to spend anything on a side pool, there’s the £0 side pool. You can either decide this in advance or make your final decision on the night - sizing up your other possible side pool rivals!
How the side pools pay out
All payouts will be by side pool entered, split 70:30 to the 2 players that get furthest in their group. This means that although generally the tournament format will be a Swiss, there will be no return of stake for a player who just wins the majority of their matches as we have done in the past; only 1st and 2nd placed players will receive eligible payouts**.
Because we'll be randomly selecting groups of players, you will almost certainly not just be playing against players that have entered the same side pool/s as you. The winner of each side pool will be decided by their ranking on Backgammon Hub for that night's play**.
We think this format is going to be the best of all worlds. But - these things are always a balancing act, so please do let us know your experience over the coming weeks, so we can tweak things a bit if required. We look forward to trying out our new format on Monday - sign up now and see you there!
* We'll do our best to create equally-sized groups. Please sign-up in advance to make our lives easier.
** There will be occasions where more than one player has equal most match wins. In those cases we'll go strictly by Hub standings - so tiebreaks, Buchholz score etc will determine who's above who.
[Note: this is a change from what was originally posted, where we said "In those cases we'll split the relevant side pool/s equally among those players". We've binned that approach as it meant splitting up small sums into tiny pots].
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