Well we had 9 players yesterday for the 200. I took my new concept:

Boba BH
Han Scoundrel
Lobot
Lando DS
Princess Leia of CC
Ugnaught Demolitionist x4
General Dodonna
Obi JS
Mon Cal Tech Specialist x1
Map - hardboard

Round 1 I faced off against a kid who had Aurra, Vader's Apprentice Redeemed, Lando DS, R2P0, Ug x3, Loda. His map choice was also hardboard.

He won side and set up around the pit area. I really think he would have won, but the dice were horribly against him. When he needed 5's to hit with Aurra, he rolled a 1 and a 2 (on the fp reroll). My reinforcements this game were an Aqualish Assassin and a Kel Dor Bounty Hunter. Boba and Han took turns pummeling Aurra and VAR, and eventually it was just Loda left. I just kept moving away from him until he was out of Force, and then finished him off. The funniest part of the game for me was that Leia kept hitting Loda consistently, needing 8's to hit as I combined fire with Dodonna each time. She really kept the pressure off of Boba and Han.

1-0

Game 2 vs. Admiral Graybar's "Imperial Bombing Run." This was a squad with Thrawn, Vader CotS, Jabba CL, Nyna, Wicket, and a bunch of Kel Dor. I gave Obi's LS to Leia in the hopes of using Force Sense over and over again. I lost map roll and we set up on Rancor Pen. I also lost side, so I was at an immediate disadvantage. I brought in 5 Gran for reinforcements since Graybar didn't have Accurate Shot. They screened almost every shot and collected Gambit on round 1 for me. I lost Leia somewhere around round 5 when she was the only legal target for a pair of cunning Kel Dor (DOH!), but I went on to win the game. In my defense, there were a lot of distractions from others in the store who watched our game. Despite a tough battle, I don't think I ever fell behind in gambit. At the end of the game, time was called, and Vader was my opponent's only remaining piece. (He still had 5 Force as I recall.)

2-0

At this point, the judge announced the computer crashed and couldn't get it to come back on, so that was the end of the tournament. Incredibly frustrating, but no one's fault, really.

It wouldn't be a DCI event if there wasn't something to gripe about with the program either. 9 players meant every round someone got a bye.

In round 1, there were 4 winners and 1 bye. In round 2, 4 of those with a 1-0 record were paired off, and the fifth 1-0 record was paired against a player with a 0-1 record. The bye for round 2 went to a player with an 0-1 record, which meant at the end of round 2, had the tournament continued into round 3, there would have been 3 people with a 2-0 record, 3 people with an 0-2 record, and 3 people with a 1-1 record. The confusion around the issue was why the bye didn't go to one of the people with the 1-0 record, instead of pairing a person against someone with a game loss. At the end of the tournament, the person paired in that way would not finish in first place because he had a weaker "strength of schedule," having been paired against two people at the lower end of the brackets.

Damn I hate Swiss. I have always hated Swiss from the day I was first introduced to the format back in 1998.

That is too bad that your tournament was shut down because the computer crashed. Clearly you knew the logic behind it's choices. Why didn't you guys just roll off to decide pairings per record? Back before our LGS was DCI supported we did our whole tournaments that way. I can't imagine sending nine people home mid tournament because of something so trivial. If I'm getting sent home after round two the store better be on fire (I'd blame one of the Yu-Gi-Oh kids).

That SS squad you faced in round 2 sounds brutal. Good thing for you your three heavy hitters were all mobile attackers.

Actually we just broke out the RPG books and played a session, hoping the PC would come back on after a while. It never happened, and by the time we stopped the RPG session, it was almost 8:00.

I do believe the Swiss system is designed to give the Byes to whoever is the absolute lowest in rankings so far for the day.

Giving the bye to one of the 1-0 people wouldn't really be the best option either though. After 3 rounds, if that person won their 3rd game as well, they'd be at 3-0. In comparison, another person who actually played all 3 games, and won those 3 games would be at 3-0 as well, but because they played 3 separate opponents, there's a much greater chance that they will have a lower Strength of Schedule than the guy who is 3-0 but with only 2 games played. I would complain a lot more in that situation.

Getting byes improves your strength of schedule. If you win against someone, and then they get a bye at some point in the tournament, it really does not hurt your strength of schedule all that much.

Sucks about the computer though. I would've liked to see how your squad fared against some other forms of squads.

The other side of it, and where the complaint comes in, is that the person who got paired against the 0-1 player has a weaker SoS at the end of round 3, leaving him/her in 2nd.

There's just no getting around it; Swiss is a stupid system. If this were the only issue, I'd just shrug, but it's not.

Yeah, well, the only way to truly get around it completely is to just do an elimination system, whether it's single or double, and only the undefeated person can win.

And that means NOT playing DCI.

Not necessarily. You can use the DCI computer program to still determine the matches and report the wins/losses. You don't have to use the 'Perform Pairings' option in the program, you can manually input your own pairings.

There's actually a couple a ways you could go about doing it. If you're doing single elimination, at the end of each round, you use the program to Drop whoever lost. In a situation where you have an odd number of undefeated players, someone will still get a bye, but you'll still have to play enough games to knock it down to only 1 undefeated person. Double elimination is a little bit tougher, but you basically just play in a round-robin style as you go.

The other option is to manually input the pairings for every single round. You can force someone who is 1-0 to have the bye instead if that's what you want. That way, everybody still gets to have their games reported to DCI. There's been more than once where we have had a computer problem, or not been able to access the computer, and we went ahead and played several rounds of a tournament, trying to decide the pairings on our own, and then you just go into the computer later and input the pairings and results for each round.

DCI doesn't care who plays who in each round of a tournament. It doesn't track how many tournaments you've won. It doesn't care about what your Strength of Schedule was for that tournament. It just cares about who your opponent is in one single game, and what effect that has on your DCI ranking whether you win or lose.