Pokémon TCG: Sword and Shield—Brilliant Stars

How about byes at Nats

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Matt Yuen

Matt Yuen

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Back in 2004, States Champions were given byes are Nationals. How about bringing byes back?

Since ratings are so important this season, what do you guys think of the idea of giving players with high enough ratings byes during the first/second round... Say, a player with a Rating 1900+ gets a first round bye, etc...
 
Byes should be avoided when possible. A bye is a mechanism made for swiss because people cannot play a match without an opponent to play against.

There is enough "incumbency protection" in Pokemon anyway.
-There is a limit to how much one's rating can fall in one match
-The top 4 at World Championship get invites the next World Championship
 
There isn't anything inherently wrong with awarded byes either through tournament wins or rating. You can view the 'incumbancy protection' as a good thing or a bad thing. TBH I think that a bit of protectioin goes a long way.

However from a practical point of view we do not have a way of introducing byes to tournaments that are grouped into flights.
 
In Norway, all City Champions get one (optional) bye at Nationals, and all State Champions get one too. People who are both State and City Champions can get two byes. This only works here because we have 9 City Championships and 2 STPs. I guess it wouldn't work very well in the US as winning these tourneys seems of less value in the US.
 
I didn't use my bye because I had such I high rating, and wanted to build it further.
Even though I won 4 CC

But really, if you are such a good player, you don't fear that first round in nats anyway. It is the round where your chances of meeting newbies are biggest anyway
 
For the ratings part, I agree with your statement.

But on the newbie statement, I disagree. Anyone could have _one_ unlucky start in one of his/her Nationals matches. If that crappy start happens to be on your very first round, and you lose to a newbie, your resistance is ruined for the reminder of the day. Not only will the weak player give you bad opp win %, but you will also never face an undefeated player, all day long. :(
 
Tego said:
For the ratings part, I agree with your statement.

But on the newbie statement, I disagree. Anyone could have _one_ unlucky start in one of his/her Nationals matches. If that crappy start happens to be on your very first round, and you lose to a newbie, your resistance is ruined for the reminder of the day. Not only will the weak player give you bad opp win %, but you will also never face an undefeated player, all day long. :(
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If I enter a tournament with me and 500 new pleyers with their theme decks, I will win all my matches.

Also: Bad tiebreak is better than the no tiebreak at all you get from a bye

Edit: I had bad starts in 4 of my swiss rounds, and won all expet round 7, which were vs. a GOOD player.
I would have won that too if I faced a bad player
 
BJ thats not how your resistance calculations work. Byes hurt your opponents resistance because a bye is a win without increasing your win%.

Its very hard to recover from a bad start against the fast T2 decks. T2 Vaporeon EX and you will usually lose that swiss round. Same goes for Flariados and similar fast status effect decks. Stantler too can completely ruin a tournament.

Donk loses and wins are part of the FUN of Pokémon but they have no place at nationals and in rated events late season. I like the fact that in Pokémon the best players don't win everything: that the wealth gets spread out a bit by the luck. But I'd want the impact of luck to be limited to just that tournament and not to ruin a large part of the season. A players view on awarded byes is often influenced by just how bad the impact of a donk will have not just on that tournament but on the whole season. At nationals using single game swiss, I'd always advise taking any awarded byes. No matter how good you are the donk monster can strike you down.
 
Black_jirachi said:
Edit: I had bad starts in 4 of my swiss rounds, and won all expet round 7, which were vs. a GOOD player.
I would have won that too if I faced a bad player
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I've seen you have bad starts and been donked. It happens to everyone ones in a while. Everyone can lose one out of their 7 Swiss rounds, it's OK. But losing the first one is not OK, it pretty much means that your day is ruined. So using a bye can be very smart, just to prevent this.
 
Byes are unfair, and to be honest, most good players (Who I assume, with the exception of some rare cases, will be the ones that won states) don't like getting byes, since they're terrible for resistance.
 
Good grief. Go and check how byes affect your opponents resistance before making such statements. Though to be fair I'm not at all sure where the actual algortihm used is written down.

if you go 4-2 without a bye then your win % is 66.7%
if you go 4-2 _with_ a bye then your win % is 60%

60% is less than 66.7% and this hurts your opponents: ergo its good for you!
 
I think byes at major tournements are horrible.

I have a perfect example. Back when WOTC had the game depending on how well you did you would get up to 3 i think Byes. I had a friend who got 3 byes for the first 3 rounds. He went X-1 and because of the byes he got 9th in a T8 cut. If he had played those 3 games he would of had a better chance to raise his resistance. I personally would rather play anyway. If rating invites are really gonna be decided at nats I would want to play. I mean the 1st and possibly the 2nd round should be the easiest to win since a lot of "rogue" deck make it thru the first round but usually not thru the 2nd round.
JMO Tho,
Drew
 
I can't see why Byes should be given out at Nationals. I personally hate byes because whoever gets the first bye would most likely have their resistance tampered with, and I personally believe that it's stupid. I hate tournaments with an odd amount of players for the same reason.
 
I think the thing people are misunderstanding is that they think the fact that their opponent for round 1 is a bye means that this opponent won't add to their opp win %. However your own opp win % isn't the sum of all your opponent's win %, it's more like the avarage. If one of your 7 rounds was a bye, it doesn't mean you have less opp win % to "take from", it just means you get the average of 6 people instead of 7 people. =\ And since you won round 1, all people you played should have at least one win ...:p

Byes don't hurt your opp win %!
 
I know that there were people at Nationals in 2004 who got byes but did not win a State. It was pretty messed up. Let's not relive that.
 
In 2004 my son had a two round bye as a state champion. He hated it. You show up at 9 AM for the tournament, but you don't get to start playing until noon or 1 PM. For a 10- it was horrible.
 
I didn't read any of the posts above, but I had another idea for Nationals..

Instead of doing tiebreakers for Nationals based on Opponent's Win %, why don't they do it off rating coming into (or after Swiss rounds) of Nationals? I think it would be more fair to give the higher rated players a better chance to win their National championships.

Just an idea though, what do you think?
 
Magnechu said:
I didn't read any of the posts above, but I had another idea for Nationals..

Instead of doing tiebreakers for Nationals based on Opponent's Win %, why don't they do it off rating coming into (or after Swiss rounds) of Nationals? I think it would be more fair to give the higher rated players a better chance to win their National championships.

Just an idea though, what do you think?
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Hate the idea. If you're interested why, I'll go into a long shpeel about it (on AIM or on here), but I'm certain that'd be bad.

Byes aren't bad...but they aren't a good idea, either. I don't think people with high ratings should be put on a pedestal of any sort...in order to have a legitimate tourney, make EVERYONE go through the gauntlet, even if they have a 6969 ELO.
 
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