It's been a while since we've said anything about the year-round Co-event league idea that was mooted earlier in the year, and so it may have seemed that nothing was happening with it, but it's with great pleasure that I can announce with at least a fair amount more detail, the first yearly Finals Of the Co-event Annual League, or FOCAL.
For those who weren't in the loop before, the idea is very simple. A number of events across the year already exist, and so there seemed to be a great opportunity to tie a number of them together and form an annual calendar and overall table of results to determine the best performers over a year.
The way of doing that will be to have a scoring system across all these events and tabulating the results to generate the top 8 performers across the course of a year. These 8 players will be invited free to an event on the 3rd December 2016 in Birmingham where they'll compete in a round robin + final to determine the FOCAL champion. This event will be run alongside an event for anyone else who wishes to attend, which will have a lower than average entry fee. We hope that this will create a big atmosphere, and we can view it as a Countdowners end of year shindig
The way that we'll be running this event with a less than average entry fee, is by each involved tournament organiser putting £1 per player from their tournament(s) into a central pot which will be used to pay for the final event.The scoring system has not changed much from when it was originally mooted. We ran various suggested methods through spreadsheets to try and see what generated a good balance between allowing the best players to make the finals, whilst also giving those who have shown unwavering commitment to the support of these events a chance to do so. The winning player of each tournament will receive a points score of 2*y where y is the number of people who entered the tournament. Each player underneath that will receive 2 points less than the player before. In the event of 2 players finishing in exactly the same position, they will receive the average of the amount of points on offer for the 2 places they occupy. The number of events from which attendees can take points will be capped at the closest value to 66% of the number of events in the year.
Each tournament will be very much encouraged to maintain their own feel and identity, there will be very little standardisation of format, and indeed some events, either current or future may prefer not to be involved for various reasons. We will look to make sure that such events can exist quite happily within the year and not try and compete against them - ultimately we're interested in as many people getting to enjoy these events as possible.
We have a provisional calendar of events for 2016 - these MAY change, however we're confident that the bulk of what you see here will remain true.
30th-31st January - Lincoln, Lincoln Hangover (Ben)
27th February - Bristol (Mark/Jeff)
30th April - Leeds (new event) (Callum)
28th May - Kings Lynn (Mike)
2nd July - St Albans (JRJ)
23rd July - Nottingham (Ben)
20th August - Milton Keynes (Zarte)
10th September - Dublin (Eddy)
8th October - Huddersfield (JRJ)
12th-13th November - Glasgow, Glasgowonthen (Alan)
3rd December - Finals - Birmingham (Combined Effort)
All in all, this will be 11 events, plus the grand final in December.
In addition to this, Reading will take its usual spot on the Easter weekend in March, but this will not form part of the FOCAL points calendar at this point.
To try and get this done as smoothly as possible, a committee was created with a selection of current and former event organisers. This committee, if anyone is interested, will be publicly joinable by election on an annual basis - it was just felt the formation of it should be done quickly. Mark Murray'll be chairing it until after the first finals, Jeff Clayton is vice-chair, Chris Marshall is treasurer, and James Robinson is secretary. In addition, myself, Alan Young, Ben Wilson, Callum Todd, Eddy Byrne, Jen Steadman and Mike Brown are all involved.
Any questions, please ask
