@redrum:
I think one of the challenges is going to be the duration of the tournament given those pauses. I have a feeling we might not even finish all 8 brackets in 2016 at the rate we are going!
This is probably true for some of the brackets. However, I’m not sure that will affect when we can start the next tournament. Here is why. The plan (ideally) will be to start the next tournament when we are down to the “final four” in each bracket. The final four is the last two in the winner’s bracket and the last two in the loser’s bracket being the final players left (there of course could be less than this). Those 4 will be seeded into the top four seeds in that bracket for the next tournament, meaning they will be the most likely to get a first round bye. This first round bye allows them to finish up the prior tournament without having too many games at once. Does that part make sense? And, those players finishing up the prior tournament will have some leeway in the new tournament anyway, so that the game burden should never be an issue.
I used to play correspondence chess in the 80’s and 90’s, and each year had a championship. So, in that case, with three rounds at about 2 years per round, there were usually 6 championships going on at once (it was the U.S. Open, called The Golden Knights). :-o At one point I had about 65 games going – that’s a few too many lol.
For us, we will be just finishing up the prior tournament, getting more players in to the next one (hopefully!). The next one will also have two weeks between each bracket starting to give more time there. I’m thinking there will be at least 9 months between tourney start dates (and if we get more than 24 to play, close to a year for each).
