Arlington Heights, IL
Quoted from Marvin:You're right it was shitty, I left out the money is funneled to Josh and his elite friends at the state *and* national level. That's really semantics though since to make nationals they need to win $$$$$$ at state. You may find it crazy but the tip players do tend to know who each other are.
We've tried to fight against this by sticking to our only ONE representative per state at Nationals. Many of the elite players that are often battling eachother for a given state believe some of the "tougher" states should earn more invitations to Nationals. The most exciting part of running Nationals for me is getting to meet all of these first-time State Champions that have traveled out to represent their state.
Some stats from this most recent year (out of 46 competitors):
- 14 of those players were ranked outside of the top 1000 (30%)
- 24 of those players were ranked outside of the top 250 (52%)
- 15 of those players were ranked in the top 100 (33%)
- 3 of those players were ranked in the top 25 (7%)
Quoted from Marvin:There would be less of a complaint from most people if they just charged a registration fee and used that to pay for the administration rather than trying to take in as much as possible and redistributing it to their friends.
See previous threads with respect to how the player registration fee wouldn't have been a successful path for us. The current number of players that register their account at NO CHARGE is 10.5%. That number would only decrease if we incorporated paying a fee into that process.
The complaints have actually settled down quite a bit once people realized we were proceeding with our plans.
I for one have been a bit surprised at the lack of shrinkage so far. Here's some additional year-over-year stats for Jan/Feb 2017 compared to Jan/Feb 2018:
Total attendance - 14,460 last year vs. 13,425 this year (-7%)
Total number of events - 636 last year vs. 611 this year (-4%)
We'll continue to monitor how things go . . .
