[BD] Tour 0

[Chris Rowlands]

As someone who plays regularly on the boundary between Tour A and B (we were up and down like a yoyo last year) my feeling is that it's not so much of a problem that teams from other countries play in Tour, it's that they get preferrential treatment and only turn up for one event. Paddy / Seamus Murphy are a classic example of the right way to approach the problem; Paddy earn their place at the top end of A tour fair and square, same as everyone else: they go through seeding and they turn up to all the tours and nobody can really complain that they were cheated out of their promotion space / unfairly demoted because of it. 

In contrast, because of the way the points are worked out at tour, relegation / demotion really is a big deal; A tour teams not only get more points, but have the opportunity to play against top-level teams and really improve their game, not to mention attracting stronger players with more experience. Having an extra team show up for one tour, affect the seedings / schedule and then not turn up to the remaining tour events is often a kick in the teeth for both the team that lost out on that 16th place position and the ones who lose out on valuable tour points because they faced a foreign uber-team early on in the tournament.

I appreciate that there are UK teams that sometimes can't make all the tour events; we're an amateur sport and sometimes you just can't get the numbers, but to have no intention of going through the seeding process or turning up to the other tour events is a whole different matter. If teams just want to play one event, I'm sure there are better alternatives.

Magic
Strange Blue #20
As usual this is not necessarily the view of my team, but it damn well should be.



		
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