$4K ASLT Weekend Tournament Summary

Results and select videos for other events can be viewed on the tournament homepage. You can view a list of all recorded matches on this Youtube channel.

This was our first tournament at ASLT in several years, and the first tournament ever by the current tournament staff. We received overwhelmingly positive feedback from players and spectators, and we would like to hilight the following positives about our event:

• A majority of the round robin groups were able to start on time for every single round-robin event but one.
• We were largely able to fill defaulted players with players on our waitlist, so that players in the round robins almost all got three matches. Across 11 singles events, our tournament only had five defaults that we were unable to fill. We are looking toward implementing measures to lower this number even further in the future.
• In addition to Asymchem Open Singles champion Xiang Jing Zhang, we were honored to host Udaya Ranasingha (former Sri Lankan National Team member), Kai Zhang (US National Team member), and Sally Moyland (US Junior National Team member). As a result, spectators and waiting players were treated to high-quality matches throughout the afternoon.
• Delicious, affordable, and convenient food from Taste of Hunan was available for sale during lunch. Non-vegetarian lunch boxes sold out almost instantly due to the extreme popularity of Taste of Hunan.
• Air conditioning and free water were provided to players.
• The experimental Brazillian Teams event surpassed our expectations and was an extremely fun and passionate event for both players and spectators. At our next tournament, we hope to add Brazillian Teams Under 6000 as a headliner event on Saturday alongside the Asymchem Open Singles. Please start looking for teams now!

While we are quite satisfied how the tournament turned out, as this was our first time running a tournament at this scale, there was significant room for improvement. We hope to fix the following problems at our next tournament:

• While we were happy to start almost all of our events on time for most groups, frequently one group in each event was forced to start late since one or two tables would be occupied by the semi-finals and finals of the previous event. These slow groups would result in the events finishing late even though they mostly started on time. While this did not affect most players, we hope to treat our finalists better next time!
• Players who were seeded out of the group were forced to wait several hours before getting to play.
• In order to get all our events to start on time, players were quite chaotically yanked around different tables. Due to the chaos, certain results, especially the C vs D matches in the groups, were not properly recorded.
• Recorded results were not posted online in a timely manner.
• Players were hungry and thirsty on Saturday night as we ran out of free water and our food sold out too quickly.
• Lower events on Friday night did not have enough space on their tables. We will not use this table layout next time.

In response to these problems, we hope to make the following changes to our next tournament:

• We will reduce the total number of entries we accept at any given time-slot to account for the semi-finals and finals of the previous event so that we are able to start more groups at the scheduled start time.
• Players who are seeded out of the round-robin will not be defaulted if they show up within two hours after the event’s scheduled start-time. Tables should be available for warm-up after all round robins have started playing their final match. We will do our best to notify players before the tournament if they have been seeded. Please keep in mind that players can opt out of being seeded out of the round robin.
• While it is inevitable for different round robin groups to share tables in order for us to finish our events on time while hosting enough players for a respectable tournament, we will make our table assignments more systematic in order to reduce most of the chaos and allow ourselves to fully record all the results.
• We plan to have a tournament staff member who’s job is to record results as they come in and make sure all match sheets are completely filled out.
• As a result of the above two changes, we tentatively hope to make the next tournament USATT-Sanctioned.
• We plan to provide more food and water for sale on both Saturday and Sunday. We hope to have a tournament staff member available who’s job is to meet players’ food and water needs.

If you have any feedback, we would be happy to hear it. Please fill out this form.

Thanks again for coming! We hope to see you again at our next tournament!