[dave251164]

You need to average over 56% in your best 5 boards to qualify for the final.
I was curious to see how 80%+ scores were being achieved - was it the usual ideas like opening 1 of your shortest minor and then leaping to 3nt, even if you have a 6/7 card spade suit?
But no, this was something new again!
The trick seems to be to play in the qualifiers that take place later in the day and have fewer tables, but still many boards in the deal pool to prevent cheating.
Then your score is often only compared with ONE other player!
So someone in a 64 table event got 80%+ with 7 x 100%, 4 x 50% and 1 x 75%, so his scores were got by comparison with only one other player, except on the 75% board where it was 2 others.
This was not a freak scoring episode as another had nearly 80% with 8x100%, 3x50% and a 0%!

Whereas entrants to the first BIC Qualifier of the day seemed to getting their acore by playing against many more opponents - like 16 or 17 for example.
So an 80% score obtained largely against one person would be more beneficial to your average than a much harder to achieve 65% score against 16/17 others , which is highly unsatifactory indeed!

So in trying to avoid players cheating by using a large deal pool, players can game (cheat?) the system instead.
12 tops against a single player in a later Qualifier, which is do-able and you have a 100% score to help your average along!
This just cannot be right or fair!
I wonder if this is just a badly designed tourney or whether it's just a money making exercise to get in lots of $3 entrance fees or maybe both?!
A possible solution might be to count your best 5 lots of points won, instead of using percentages? As this would take into account the number of players playing each board.

[smerriman]

dave251164, on 2021-March-31, 10:06, said:

.. or whether it's just a money making exercise to get in lots of $3 entrance fees or maybe both?!

If you place 4th place overall, you get a prize worth $15BB, which is the minimum you need to pay just to qualify. It's clearly not *not* about the money

But if you've ever played Robot Rebate - where you pay $1BB and need a 55% score to get $1.50BB back - you'll find that it's considerably *harder* to score well against 1 or 2 other players, compared to a bigger field. At least, that's my experience, and I've seen other forum posts saying similar.