2001 WORLD TANTRIX CHAMPIONSHIP - ASSISTANT CONTROLLER'S REPORT

Assistant Controller Jamie Sneddon has kindly provided the following entertaining report which gives an insight into what it's like to help with controlling an online tournament as big as the World Championship. Editorial comments (sorry, couldn't resist!) are in purple. Other WTC reports pages are:

Well, the tournaments are just about finished for the year, and it seems fitting to comment on how things went from a controller's point of view. It seems we did the WTC draw in the lobby a long time ago, with more players than ever before. Discussions are already underway about the format of next year's draw. Entrants will be contacted for their own views during December.

When games are being played, there are usually a few emails (or more than a few) every day about the WTC to deal with. This tournament I have accumulated 150 emails concerning the WTC, not counting the 100's (seems like 1000's) of game results sent automatically to me from the results submission form. Since I'm stats obsessed (see Jamie's comment below!), I checked and thought you might like to know that I've had (counting my replies too) nearly 1100 emails about the WTC, though I don't remember them all individually, plus 194 entry-related submissions and (like Jamie) 827 results submissions! Sometimes, I'd see a game result arrive and head for the lobby to see if there was another game to watch. So it's not just me who does this - I gave up trying to come in incognito as a guest when people started to say 'Hi Steven' every time they saw a guest in a WTC game room ... but I was lucky enough to see some great games 'live'.

Everyone this year seems to have been reasonably well behaved - we haven't had any issues about the rules, we'd like to thank M*r*a* from the bottom of our hearts for being so tolerant :-) and have only had to default a few people. We never want to default players, since we'd rather have as many games played as possible, but sometimes there is no other option. Time conversion doesn't seem to have caused too many problems this year. I was one of those guilty of not being able to convert into and out of GMT, and I'm a maths major! I'd like to add my thanks to all the players who made this such a good tournament to run

Steven, of course, has the difficult job. Not only does he have to put all of the results onto the webpages, he's been writing detailed reports for us all on the important games (and some not so important ones?), and seems to be able to come up with statistics like "this is the first time that a southern hemisphere unseeded player has beaten a North American on a Tuesday". I never mentioned Tuesday! ;-) ... and I know the main reason why you all keep coming back to read these reports is to find out what ridiculous statistic I'd come up with this time! :-) All this at a time when he is also concentrating his efforts on getting Tantrix into shops in the UK for Christmas. Contrary to popular belief, I do spend a lot more time on this than on writing the reports, I just write the reports instead of sleeping!

You'd think that we'd have the advantage of picking up some clever ideas after watching all these brilliant Tantrix players winning matches it worked for Heli, after all, but that doesn't seem to have quite worked this year, with both Steven and I being knocked out into the plate. Which is where I should give credit to my brother Phil, who has worked at keeping the Plate competition and the Fantasy Tantrix going this year, including updating webpages, a skill which is still beyond me. Phil is definitely a real star!

By the way, the 2001 WTC home page has been hit 6500 times this year, the various results pages (not including the Plate or the Fantasy) 4000 times, the two player lists over 1000 times and, to my astonishment, these reports pages have been hit over 1200 times too, making a total of over 12500 hits so far from people playing in and following this year's World Championship! Thank you all for making all the work seem worthwhile.

The tournaments have just about finished (just the 3PPO and Plate Final to go), which is sooner than last year. must be because there are no Tantrix pros in the later stages this year to mess things up *blush* Time for a nice break before tournaments start again next year, when hopefully we'll see all the regular tournament players back for their national or continental champs there might even be a couple of new tournaments as well, and lots of new players too ... maybe a few new assistant controllers? and maybe some assistant controllers in line for a 'promotion' if they learn how to update web pages!

Report on the Final         Other WTC Reports         World Championship home page

Results from: ROUND 1     ROUND 2     ROUND 3 (seeds 17-32 join)
ROUNDS 4 -> FINAL (seeds 1-16 join) - Draw & Results - last updated on Tuesday, 21-Mar-2006 21:15:16 GMT
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