Gooooood Morning X Wing, Coach here. I am half *** planning the OCX Organized National Tournament for Open Play This will be a Friday afternoon - Sunday afternoon event located (probably) in Cedar Falls, IA. Why Cedar Falls you ask. It's 4 hours away from almost every major Midwest city.

But more importantly I wanted to do something different than a traditional swiss cut to top. I want to try out the pod system FFG did at Worlds last year to determine the final cut. The idea is to run pods of 6 people for 3 rounds (round robin) to determine the top player from each pod. That player earns a seat in the final day of competition. Each player can participate in 2 pods to try to get a seat at the final day. Players who have won a seat from their 1st pod and win a second pass their seat to the 2nd ranked player. Prizes will be distributed for each round you participate in, to lessen the chances of players dropping from pods, as well as a pod winner prize.

Every player who has won a pod will play in a single elimination tournament on Sunday until a winner is crowned. Again there will be prizes for everyone who advances to the next round.

But wait there's more you say! With the pod system there is no need for a set start time on Saturday allowing for players to make their way to the tournament on their own time. Once there are 6 people that are signed up, a pod will start. Also there will be tons of other events such as hunger games, mario kart, epic, and drafts that can help pass the time if your 2 pods are completed early.

Hopefully this will take place this winter, (January -March) Please comment below on possible snags, or things that could go wrong with this format, thanks! Yub Nub

If every 6 people through the door equals a pod, I could see someone trying to make sure they're 6+ people away from any famously good players when checking in.

If I were going with some friends, I'd go to the second pod with friends who both did and didn't make it, and collude to effectively box everyone else out and guarantee that friend the cut.

It might be a good idea to do separate second sets of pods for people who already made cut to avoid it.

6-man 3-round pods are a little odd. With 8, you get a perfect single-elimination; with 4 you get a perfect round robin. With 6, you have a pair-down in round 2 (unless you are just doing random pairings, in which case you can have three pair-downs, but who cares?), and could end up with no undefeated player and some messy mov situations.

I'd do it with 4-man pods where you play each other player in the pod, or 8-man pods where as soon as you lose, you drop and get in another pod.

launch two 4-man pods when 8 people are in the queue, randomly selecting them into the two groups to avoid collusion.

For the most excitement in 4-man round robin, pair winners against losers in round 2. It reduces the chance for collusion in round 2 and if there's no collusion, you're guaranteed to still have at least one round-3 game that matters. If you pair winner v winner for round 2, you have a good chance of putting 2-0 vs 0-2 in round 3 and making the 1-1 vs 1-1 game meaningless as 0-2 drops/doesn't care.

What do you do when you don't have a number of players divisible by 6 (or by 4, if you take @skotothalamos 's suggestion) show up?

I'm liking all of these suggestions, thanks guys

I'll second the call for pods of 8, but I'd recommend a different approach to pairing them up. With 8 players, losing one game guarantees you've lost if you pair via standard swiss. However, reverse swiss allows even the player furthest behind in round 2 the slim chance to catch back up. Reverse swiss pairs the player in first place with the player in last, which in pods as small as 8 means that competition is still fierce, but less winner-take-all in the first round.

Random seeding of pods is essential otherwise you will definitely encounter groups gaming the system.

I'd also highly recommend using Hanger Bay format for the pods, with the final group choosing and sticking with one of their two lists. It's really easy to get screwed over by a bad matchup in 3 rounds, even with reverse swiss.

1. Prints OP suggestion/Format from printer.

2. Takes printed OP suggestion/Format and tears it in two.

3. There!! OP suggestion/Format BROKEN ?

13 hours ago, Astech said:

However, reverse swiss allows even the player furthest behind in round 2 the slim chance to catch back up. Reverse swiss pairs the player in first place with the player in last, which in pods as small as 8 means that competition is still fierce, but less winner-take-all in the first round.

Of course, for round 2, the player in first will have just played the player in last, and everyone else down the line will have just played the person they "should" be paired with in round 2, due to the zero-sum nature of x-wing scoring (well, 400-sum, but whatever). 1v7, 2v8, 3v5, 4v6 would work for round 2, though.

Reverse swiss will almost definitely lead to a 2-0 vs 0-2 game in the final round, where the 0-2 player is just trying to play spoiler to see if one of the 2-1s can sneak in. It could even lead to two players being 3-0 with perfect mov and having a random tiebreaker to proceed which is very messy.

It's even worse than that. Assume you have four players on Team W, who always beat the four players on team L 200-0. They just randomly got paired up to have every match be W vs L for round 1. All the W's are 1-0; all the L's are 0-1. Using reverse swiss, we now make 4 more W vs L matches for round 2. Now we have four players at 2-0 and four at 0-2. Do that again for round 3 and we have four 3-0s and four 0-3s. We could even do a 4th round without repeating any matchups, but nothing is being decided. That seems like a problem.

Drops could be a concern, too, if there's no incentive to continue playing once you lose a game.

I see the upside of what you're trying, but I do see some potential challenges.

The biggest problem I see with this format is that as soon as you lose one game in your pod you probably can't win the pod, and definitely after you lose 2. Since the only thing on the line is for first place, you might as well drop or at least stop trying. (Granted this problem exists in classic swiss too, just after 2-3 losses usually)

Also, you could end up with some players trying to get themselves near newer players or away from better players to improve their odds.

As far as game time, I guess it is on the players to track their own time remaining? This could lead to issues if someone forgets or isn't on top of watching the time. How do the pairings work between games? (I didn't see the worlds pod system, so maybe there is an answer to this).

As @skotothalamos said, pods of 6 is an awkward number, 4 (play each other player once) or 8 (swiss) makes more sense with 3 rounds.

You mention the upside of being able to not have a hard start time, but if the idea is everyone plays in 2 pods of 3 games, that's still up to 9 hours. So you're going to need to have a soft start time anyways.

Determining a top cut is also less clean. In classic swiss it's easy, you just take the top 16. But with this, you end up with a top X, where X is the number of pods. So you'll have some buys probably in your top cut.