"Новичок SUMMER-2013"

We kindly request all playoff participants to contact their opponents as soon as possible and to immediately inform the tournament organizer about any problems, rather than waiting until the end of the first round.

The group stage is over. The final results will be available in the tables soon.
Most players managed to meet the deadlines. 72 out of the planned 80 games were played, which is a very good result for the tournaments, + 3 qualifying games.

Let me explain the decision regarding Group F.
The difficulties we had to overcome:
- the number of participants with equal results - five, which is extremely inconvenient for tie-breaker games;
- limited time - the playoffs are already underway, opponents are waiting, i.e., we have a few days, which means no more than 2 tie-breaker games, and even that is a lot;
- most players lack consistent rating statistics and have played very few games in the season;
- fairness suggests that the strongest players should advance to the playoffs from the group, however, based on the round-robin results, the level of these five players is approximately equal... how do you choose from equals?

Ideally, we would have wanted the games to decide the outcome, not a lottery.
Many options were considered, including:
- a new round-robin - the deadline does not allow it, and the result is not guaranteed (and if there is another tie? this is quite likely based on the results of the first round) - unfair to the opponents waiting in the playoffs;
- tie-breaker games (1-2 games) - two participants felt that the proposed system was not entirely fair;
- time to play out the group - one of the participants joined as a substitute, he needed to catch up with the opponents, unfair to him;
- one game for 5 people according to the rules of the Hunger Games (this would have been the best option) - problems with the template, time limit, rules, time per game for 5 players, coordination... - this also looks like a lottery with five heroes, it would have required serious work, and again, we have tight deadlines;
- somehow use the rating - with our rating calculation system, a player without games is assigned a rating of 1500, i.e., the one who has not played a single game formally has a higher rating than the one who lost one game. One player has no games, two more have very few, and only two have played a sufficient number of games. Excluding or including them in the playoffs based on this criterion is unfair;
- and a few more, which turned out even worse...
- random selection.

We thought about this issue for quite a long time, even when this situation was just becoming likely.
The decision to randomly assign places was unanimously approved by the judges and the tournament organizer.

I think this distribution is a stupid decision, because in the "Novichok" tournament, there are many unknown players, and really strong participants could have ended up in one group, and to eliminate them just like that because someone is unlucky in the lottery?! Are we here to eat shawarma at the bazaar?
P.S. it could have been based on the seasonal rating, for example...

Thank you for your kind words. Did it take you a couple of minutes to write this post? In the future, please be more polite in your statements and do not insult the tournament organizers. We are not eating shawarma here either.
/Although, it is quite possible that it is difficult to call smart those people who work on a gaming forum for free for 3-6, or even 9-12 hours daily and run tournaments, which they don't care about. Anton and Dima spent almost the whole day yesterday organizing a 4-minute show./