Novice Bumping

I started working on the Bump invitation yesterday. The first big change is that there will be no break rounds in the two novice divisions.

Holy Elimination, Batman!

Here’s the thing, and we discussed this at length on TVFT. Bump is the first invitational any novice attends around here. It takes place the second weekend of November, and the likelihood is that all the novices have had, at most, 10 rounds, and more likely, 3 or 6 rounds at most under their young belts. They come to Bump and want to partake in all that Invitational Goodness, but the real point of the tournament ought to be to give them experience. With elims, about two thirds of the field get 5 rounds and then, what? They watch novice rounds? That’s not totally valueless, but still. As Kt said to me this weekend, at her first Invitational, NFA (which was on the Bump weekend, although once upon a time I used to say that Bump was on the NFA weekend), she made it to the break rounds, hit one of the top seeds and was out. Not much gained.

I’m not quite sure how many rounds we can get in, so I’ve left that vague on the invite, but I would imagine that if the LD field is, say, 80, we should be able to get 8 or 9 reasonable rounds in the allotted time. Trophies will go to the top 10 or so, medals to the next whatever, I haven’t quite decided yet, but it would be on a simple scale of wins/speaks, and not much different from the hardware of elims; in other words, we won’t be saving any money here. My guess is that before we get to the end rounds the placements will have mostly been determined, but I can see no great argument for not giving the most rounds to the most people when they’re just starting out.

Anyhow, that is a big change, probably the biggest for the tournament. Since O’C will be running the novice tab again, it will keep him from wandering off too much, so the benefits just keep on coming.