WHBPC 2010 - Berlin

Fuck yes. Nice work Morgan.
Can't wait to get back over to Berlin.

Semplicemente : "Großartig!"

So how the spots will be distributed?
August is worst time for cheap flights
they are kinda expensive already....

here i was thinking it would make sense to have the top 20 from each the NA's and Euros, with 8 spots to be distributed between Asia, SA and Oceania..

sorry, we are still in talks with Kevin and Jake about how many teams per region. i think we can tell you end of the week. thank you for your patience

People have to give these guys some time. Planning the Worlds this year is going to be a nightmare. So many big scenes, so many small scenes. We are lucky the Germans took the task.

On the edge of my seat here in Melbourne. Will move heaven and/or earth to be there if I know there is space to play. Australasia represent!

Due to the crushing number of applications for the available tournament slots, a system has been developed that will hopefully select the 64 teams in the fairest way possible.

From Europe and North America will each have 27 slots, and Australasia 4. This leaves 6 remaining
slots. These slots will be played for in a preliminary tournament to be held in Berlin on August 12th.

The North American entrants will be decided by the North American Hardcourt Committee with help from Kevin and Jake ATL and should be finalized by April 15. All questions or concerns from North American teams should be directed to them.

As the Europeans lack a committee, the Berlin organizers undemocratically dictate this solution. Perhaps at this years Europeans in Geneva we can discuss the formation of a European committee.

The European slots will be allotted as follows:

UK 6
Germany 5
France 4
Switzerland 3
Spain 2
Italy 3
Netherlands 2
Denmark 1
Hungary 1

Each of these countries must select an Ambassador to communicate with us the method for selecting the eligible teams. We ask that all selections be finalized by April 30. Naturally, the proper way to carry out the selection process is to hold a national tournament, as is being done in UK and Italy.

If your team did not make the cut, that does not mean there will be no polo for you this summer in Berlin. Of the four polo courts, two will be dedicated to pickup games.

Come on!! Like in EHBPC the italian mafia is pulling strings....

For all the italian guys:

http://leagueofbikepolo.com/forum/tournaments/2010/03/19/italian-selecti...

Stefan, what if North America has fewer than 24 commitments by April 15? Are the spots given back to Europeans?

Don't you think 30th april is tooooooo soon for organizing and finalizing national selection??

Steffan, will you be open to other way to select the 6 teams from UK, or you will take the 6 first teams, in the UK CHamps, regardless anyting else?

in other words, is up to us to decide how to choose them (6 teams) or if up to you?

Thanks for all your work Berliners! Does your accommodation begin on the thursday or friday night?

can we register a 4 person team?

Is this up for debate? The reason i ask is just that making the trip to berlin is going to be expensive and there are players who might want to go but there team mates can't. I don't think 4 players is an advantage as long as once a team is on the court those three players finish the game.

A lot of sports allow for an alternate to play with them. I don't see why this will be problematic for polo.

UK teams (decided by the UK Championships held in Manchester):

1. Cosmic3 (Mat, Todd, Tom)
2. Rotten Apples (Emilie, Gabes, Rik)
3. BAD Polo (Brendan, Aidan, Dave)
4. Malice International (Andy, Iain, Matt)
5. La Shmoove (Dave, James Brown, John)
6. Polo Fiasco (Adrienne, Aidan, Josh, Tony)

hi everybody, at the moment we´re pretty tight up with organising the german qualifications for the championships, which will be in Frankfurt soon. but, don´t worry, we´ll take care of everything according housing and so on, really looking forward to having you all here. In order to estimate how many of you will be arriving here on the 11th and 12th of august, please write me an email and let me know, greets anna
gnufisch@yahoo.de

We need a ride from Amsterdam to Berlin anytime before worlds can anyone help us out? there are 2 of us and we will be in AMS on the 5th or 6th till we get a ride or just ride our bikes there.

Thanks

when can teams register for the 12th pre-tournament ?

Teams who are qualified already will get mail within next days for more informations. Can someone send me an email-adress from one player of this team please?

Amanda – Tampa, FLA
Nano – Seattle, WA
Leslie – Seattle, WA

Yo Stefan, sorry we have been out of communication here in Australia, but rest assured we're getting our asses on some flights and gonna party it up with you lot!

rob / polocalypse now

Paid.

(and just spent several thousand dollars on plane tickets)

rules are already posted on the website.

id like to diacuss a pair the rules grey aspects. non aggressive body to body contact or bike what does it mean exactly? can i throw for example a non aggresive elbow or a non agresive arm over the other player arms. is this rule entirely on how the referee sees it?

anothrr ... cupping to goals then you have to pass. you mean there wil be a goal area? if not what does this rule mean ?

bonus, things that are not in the rules

can you score with the bike f.e. front wheeling or back skidding?

can you cup the ball and holding it in the air advance?

what about air mail or shootin from an air pass(scary high mallet)

and no maximum length on mallet head?

whoa that was too much for one post but i am at work my ipod and lots of polo worlds hunger

thank you for your patience i look forward to yoyr answers

Okay so who wants to pull a team together for the preliminary tournament on Aug 12? i want to play and we have to register by July 31 - one day tournie to fill 11 spots... let's do it... not sure exactly how the mixed teams work .. but send word and we'll register.. hah better book my ticket TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

just updated...
http://www.whbpc2010.org/

Some of the London contingent are looking to form wild-card teams:
http://www.lfgss.com/thread37689-7.html

Also, consider extending your Euro stay and play in the London Open the weekend after (London will house you and Berlin -> London flights are cheap, you may be able to share a vehicle with other players too):
http://www.lfgss.com/thread41457.html

can you please explain why you are using the a single elimination format? Double elimination has been used at most major tournaments for the past few years. There are lots of advantages to the system as it allows for better ranking. Please advise?

true that, double elimination FTW!

Double x2!!

It's all about the double elim; it's much more exciting to watch a team fight their way to the final through the losers bracket, there are more competitive games for people travelling half way across the world, and it's a much better way to find out which team is really best (since they have to beat more teams!).

Double elimifuckination. I'm traveling far, and at great expense, to compete here. Double elimination eliminates a "bad game" and allows a good team the opportunity to prove that they are just that.

Double Beseitigung bitte.

to explain the current plans of the berlin guys as far as i understood them, and why i think the plan is good:

- top priority: maximum number of matches for every team, whether they qualify for the final round or not. everyone takes a long journey to play in this tournament, so the most important thing for every team is to actually play as much as possible. this means: extensive, well seeded first round (fri, sat, half of sunday, 14 matches per team) followed by a rather short final round for the best 16 teams. so the total number of matches played throughout the weekend is shared in a more balanced way

- why no double elimination: double elimination works best if you have no first round, if you think the results of your first round are not very significant (for example because there are not enough matches played), or if you don't have the possibility to do an accurate seeding of the competitors (second best team can still finish second even if they play the subsequently winning team of the tournament in the very first match of the final round). when we put up greif masters here in karlsruhe, we couldn't figure out a reason to play d.e. other than it beeing common. we didn't find any example of tournaments in any sport that use both a first round and d.e. (please correct me if i'm wrong), which probably is because d.e. makes any kind of first round obsolete and enables you to save time (in our case with the disadvantage that there would be teams travelling to germany to play only 2 matches!).
basically, there's no need for a second chance in the final round if you had 14 chances in the already seeded first round to make your way as easy as possible. an extensive first round makes sure that you have an accurate ranking before the finals, which allows you to seed the teams good enough to ensure teams of equal strength won't play each other too early. by rank from first round: 1st vs 16th, 2nd vs 15th, ... while 1st and 2nd will encounter each other in the final at the earliest, if at all. a team that wins the first round will only get weaker opponents for the beginning of the final round, so you can expect a win from this team in order to be admitted to proceed. i would state that east van wouldn't have had to fight their way all through the loosers bracket into the final of last year's world championships if there had been a better seeding for the final round. same for the seattle-milwaukee match in the final round of ESPI5. those teams should never have encountered each other that early in no matter which elimination system.

- concerning the ranking: using the system described, there will be the following ranks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 shared 5th, 8 shared 9th places, ONLY if you don't play any additional matches. but it's exactly these additional matches that provide better ranking with double elimination. more matches for the first 16 teams means less matches for the other 48.
abandoning a more precise ranking between 5th and 16th in favour of 48 other teams is ok in my opinion

- "but it's awesome if a team fights it's way all the way through the loosers bracket!" - yes, indeed. but this only occurs when two equal teams encounter each other too early. this may be thrilling, but in the end it distorts the ranking.
apart from that, in a single elimination tournament, every match is a final. every single match is thrilling as hell, it's about make or break.
either way it's dramatic, yes

- we tried this with 40 teams and it works. to our experience, results are representative.

my conclusion would be: single and double elimination are equally thrilling, while single elimination is more effective in the matter of time and provides a better balanced matches-per-team ratio.
my impression is that many players want d.e. because they're used to it, not because it's superior (if there is a "superior" at all in this case). still, this is only what i think.

in the end, making everyone as happy as possible should be the major concern. in my opinion, maximum number of matches is a very important point for this. single or double elimination is a different question, BUT: accurate seeding, based on the results of the first round is very important to get representative results in the end, no matter which system is used for the finals.

so: extensive first round, small but nice final round, please

Dear Steffan and Berlin bike polo,

Please make it a double elimination. It is the standard for a reason. It's better.

Good work otherwise.

cheers,
matt

Rory, Jonny, Kev, Falcon, and everyone else who's participating in this discussion: thanks for your responses! hearing what people have to say about this plan is all we wanted to achieve for now. more opinions are welcome at any time
what everyone said is already taken very seriously here and will be the basis of the format that will actually be used

again, none of your concerns remain unheard. i'm not the one in charge, and even if i was i'd strongly refuse to decide all this on my own. same for the berlin guys i think

what kind of balls are we using?

thought I'd chime in on this one... for the folks across the pond that don't know me, I've written software for and ran (with help) two of the largest tourneys in the last season... Midwest 7 at 45 teams and NAs at 66 teams. I've spent 100+ hours pondering these issues and designing fairly complex software to run these tourneys...

Seeding:

without a doubt, Swiss rounds are the only, and I mean only, way to get an accurate seeding of a pool of teams of significant size (10+). in a round robin, you'd have to play a ridiculous number of games to get a good seeding. a real round robin is an all-play-all deal. the only way to get a good seeding with less than 60 rounds, or even 20, is if you were capable of doing statistical analysis on the results to weight each game based on the results of the opponent, which also have to be weighted - welcome to infinite recursion hell. without that weighting system, the result of a game really gives you no valuable information, because a win against the eventual winner counts the same as a win against the last place team.

with the Swiss system, every result is packed with meaning, because all the previous results of every round are embedded in each round. a win actually means something, and a win at the top to the rankings means more than a win at the bottom. this is a very good thing, and a round robin just can't do that. in just six rounds on day one, the NAs Swiss seeding predicted 9 of the top 12, and all we did to get those results is pre-seed teams for the first round as either 1, 2, 3 or 4

as a few have said already, a single elim is only acceptable with excellent seeding, and that is impossible with a round robin.

now, running a Swiss system is very difficult for such a large tourney, without a doubt. I spent a huge amount of time preparing for last weekend's tourney. it might not be possible to do it by hand, and I can't guarantee my software would work for you from across the planet... for those reasons, if a round robin is used, I HIGHLY recommend a double elim bracket

if you have a round robin system you think will work, please describe it to me, I'd love to hear the plan

here anna from frankfurt.
I lost all e-mail kontakts because my computer was dead...
For all those arriving Frankfurt, please send me an e-mail again so I can help you..
gnufisch@yahoo.de
I look forward

A Favour to ask to all you berliners..
I am shipping my Bike back to Australia on Monday the 16th and need an address for the DHL van to pick it up from.
I would just give them the address of the courts but I fly out of Berlin the same morning.
So basically, is anyone willing to have my bike (all packed and paid for) at their house until it gets picked up?
Anyone else have this issue?
Danke

Thanks so much Stefan!!!

It's pretty clear isn't it?

"Infractions that can result in a Warning, 30-second or Two-minute penalty:
Hooking or holding- Hooking is defined as using a mallet to restrain a bike or player...."

It doens't say anything about not being allowed to hook mallets - all of your mentioned scenarios are legal. Just remember that theres a big difference between hooking/holding a mallet and slashing!!

It's not really clear to me, no...

In my understanding it says that Mallet hooking will incur up to a 2 minute penalty

Unless I'm reading it wrong?

I totally agree about mallet hacking/slashing - that shit is lame and chews up mallets