If Beckite changes his mind and decides to come he'll be added as a Wildcard with the other unseeded players. If Durban, or anyone else, withdraws then they are removed from the seedings and everyone else will be moved up one place.
If anyone fails to arrive, and pay me the £20 registration fee in cash, by midday Saturday, they will be removed from the seedings and will not participate in the tournament.
At the moment I am seriously considering moving the draw itself to Saturday midday as I think it will be badly attended on Friday night.
Seedings are below. Principles used are:
Ranking
Performance in previous World Cups
Recent form and practice level
Where two players must be separated, head-to-head record
We have 4 groups to be drawn, each with 14 players. This will mean we draw from 14 seeding 'layers'. I have used alternate red to make it easier for people to spot whether they are in layer 5,6,7 etc.
The aim of this process is not to favour or punish any individual, but just to come up with four equal groups (as much as is possible). So please don't complain about your seeding. The way to prove the seeding comittee wrong is by winning, not whining.
World Cup 2006 Seedings
1 Gianni T - Italy
2 Alkis P - Greece
3 Martin J - UK
4 Klaus Lo - Norway
5 Nikos A - Greece
6 Spyros P - Greece
7 Dan C - UK
8 Michael O - Germany
9 Ben G - UK
10 Mario F - Italy
11 Robert S - UK
12 Steve C - UK
13 Martin B - UK
14 James B - UK
15 Jon G - UK
16 Marco D - Italy
17 Simon B - UK
18 Stefan V - Germany
19 Nick P - Denmark
20 Thomas K - Germany
21 John H - Sweden
22 Ben C - UK
23 Alex B - Germany
24 Glenn L - Norway
25 Rodolfo M - Spain
26 Oliver St - Germany
27 Marco S - Italy
28 Jacob K - Sweden
29 Jorg P - Germany
30 Maurizio L - Italy
31 Sascha W - Germany
32 Wayne L - Hong Kong
33 Haydn H - Wales
34 Knut L - Norway
35 Michael Mu - Germany
36 Mark B - UK
37 Mark E - UK
38 James Bu - UK
39 Henrik R - Denmark
40 Darren G - UK
41 John R - UK
42 Thomas N - Germany
43 Peter S - Germany
44 Garry C - UK
WC Claus H - Denmark
WC Haakon E - Norway
WC Tarkan D - UK
WC Astrid B - Holland
WC Jesper K - Denmark
WC Oliver V - Holland
WC Saskia B - Holland
How will the draw be done?
Each year, we make some changes to the 'random' element of the draw to ensure that we don't get too many players from one country in the same group. This is the World Cup, and you'll want to play people from everwhere EXCEPT your own country.
So, here's the current plan on how we achieve this.
1st seeds - draw freely
2nd seeds - no to 1st and 2nd of same nationality..redraw if needed
3rd seeds - ensure all groups have at least 1 UK player and no group has more than 1 Italian
4th seeds - all four groups must finish with 2 UK players (8/4) - we must place Marco in the group that already has 2 UK, then draw the others.
5th seeds - avoid group with 3 Italians, redraw Alessandro if needed
6th seeds - avoid group with 4 UK, redraw Ben if necessary
7th seeds - avoid group with 4 UK, redraw Durban if necessary
after this...we go for a free draw and just observe the rule of:
No more than 5 players from the UK (we have 20 and therefore will split them evenly)
No more than 4 players from any other country
The 'redraw' principle works as follows. You pull out the player's name, and if you exceed the quota, place the player in the next league. Then we draw again for the league we were originally making.
Can't wait for the draw now!
I mean name tags.