Knotwilg wrote:
Apparently an upset.
It really should be a round robin for such an important tournament.
Yes, the contrast with the British championship format is quite stark. The first stage is the Candidates tournament, which this year only had 15 players around 1d average and only 1 3d+ (former 4d):
http://britgo.org/results/2019/cand. The next stage is the Challenger's league, an 8 player round robin event over 4 days with last year's champion and (since this year) runner up (me) plus top 6 from the Candidates. But a bunch of those top 6 declined their places so the Challengers will dip into the 1d/1k players. And then the top 2 of that play a best-of 3-or-5 title match. That's likely to be between myself and Andrew Kay, two 4 dans. Yet the EGF pro qualifier is a battle of 6 and 7 dans for a pro title and comes down to single-elimination (after first 2 rounds).
[Edit but too slow for Java] Having double elimination down to 8 players and then a round robin league would take rather a lot of games/time though, so I'm not sure that's viable. You could use more selection down to just the 8 players from grand prix points and other events throughout the year. But in the end although Stanislaw and Lukan were the favourites and highest rated, they aren't so far ahead of the others that it feels like an injustice that Tanguy won. If Ilya had entered I'm pretty sure he would have won. Any format will come down to a bit of a lottery of who played well on the day vs not, rather than who has had the best performance over the last year. So well done to Tanguy.