Discussion for 2025 Provincial Qualifiers

With the 2024 National Championships now behind us, it's time to look ahead to 2025. Although it has been a month since the nationals, we have a lot to do to get ready for our next set of provincial qualifiers.

You have spoken, and we have listened. After our last set of qualifiers, we realized not everyone is happy with the current format. However, we have received very few suggestions for improvement. So, we are reaching out to our members for ideas on how to make our qualifiers better.

To get a realistic list of 'top players,' everyone ideally needs to play against everyone else. The problem is completing a full round-robin requires more than one day. This could theoretically be done over a weekend or spread across multiple weekends. However, provinces like New Brunswick have found  as more people realize they won't make the team, they drop out, which messes up the schedule. Because of this, New Brunswick changed their format.

In 2019, our members voted to have three sets of qualifiers, with the sum of the best two results determining the final ranking for Team PEI. In the first year, if 16 or more players registered, there were four brackets in a round-robin format, with the top four moving on to brackets of up to 16 for ranking. This second round-robin of 16 people meant long days of darts, with each person playing 45 games. Including the first round-robin, some people ended up playing over 60 games in one day, which led to many complaints.

As we moved forward, we continued with a seeding and ranking round-robin format, altering it to have the top 1 and 2 players play in an 'A' bracket of the top 8, and the 3 and 4 players in a 'B' bracket, and so on, to rank players at the end of the round-robin. (Sections of 4 if less than 16.) After two years of this format, we've heard from our members there's not enough variety in opponents to distinguish the talent in each bracket. The brackets can be skewed if three or more top players end up in the same bracket.

So, we're asking for your thoughts and proposals for our qualifying events. Whether it's a tweak to our current system or a new system altogether, we want to hear from you. We will gather all ideas, organize them and present them at our next Annual General Meeting (AGM) where they will be voted on by the attending membership. The result will be in place at our next qualifiers beginning in January.

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