Blog – Bracket of Death

The BOD keeps getting harder.

There have been three different stages to the tournament with some formatting tweaks along the way.

Back in the beginning (the first four tournaments; 2009-2011), only the top team from each division advanced to the bracket. If you lost in the round-robin stage, you were likely done for the day.

Unfortunately for me, I was never one of the top teams, so I changed the rules so that the top TWO teams would advance. This phase of the BOD lasted from 2012 until Aug of 2019.

In Aug of 2019 John Stolte suggested that ALL teams should advance to the bracket reasoning that it’d keep more people playing and give everyone false hope that they could win the tournament. This was a terrific idea and it’s been the SOP for the BOD since Sept of 2019.

You can see the effect it’s had on the average number of games people play in this graph:

I wrote the below post for Tencap back in July of 2012, just after Roger won his 7th Wimbledon title. Nobody ever read it, and I doubt anyone will read it here either, but I figured this new site needed at least one post, so I decided to re-purpose the old one here.

Roger Federer’s recent return to #1 in the rankings – his 287th week as world #1 as of 7/16/2012, a new record in his impressive list of records – along with his record tying 7th Wimbledon title and record-extending 17th major title overall, has had the effect of further widening the gap between himself and the rest of the field of GOAT-worthy contenders. Since his loss to Djokovic in the 2011 US Open semi-finals, Federer has shown us that there simply isn’t any rational way to argue that he isn’t the greatest of all time. Continue reading “Federer’s Diamond Standard(s)”