Thanks for the comments.
Obviously a huge thanks to Terry for hosting, Julie for doing the majority of the food (I noticed some others bringing cakes), Jim for the excellently decorated cake, Ross for managing the website and registrations and Rob for sponsoring the trophies.
Congratulations to David Dutton for the win with a fantastic last ball comeback in the final, beating the last ball comeback of Nick, and the last ball comeback of Will, each of which scored at least double their score on the last ball than they had achieved on their previous 4 balls put together.
Leo Marshall won the U16 competition, which due to the fact that he finished 6th in the main comp, took place at the same time as the main final, beating Phoebe Lewell into second ahead of Effie Lewell in 3rd.
The format has been ran like this for 4 years. The thinking behind it is that the games are front-loaded - meaning that the majority of the day has the majority of players actually still playing. As the tournament progresses the rounds become much shorter (semis and final are both just a single game). This gives people the confidence to travel sometimes a significant distance knowing that no matter how badly they play they'll still have a decent number of games and likely remain in the comp for a significant length of time. (Despite/because of the format I don't think anyone can argue that the players who have played best on the day have made the finals in each of the last 4 years.
The nature of the way players and games are allocated can throw up some more unusual match-ups, but it always means that you don't play the same game twice in the same round, and you don't play the same people in consecutive rounds. It also means that the Eight Ball produced one of the strangest finals I have ever seen - to my detriment unfortunately.
It has been, and will remain, a family friendly event with there being plenty of time between games to chat to people, some of which you haven't seen since the previous Cracker. There are other events where the play is much more focused with little time between games (Flip Frenzy being the extreme example).
Personally, I feel that there must be a variety of formats to keep things interesting, rather than all comps beginning to morph into similar formats to max pts.
The only negative (which I'm prepared to comment on here) is the number of people who sign up and then cancel (over a dozen this year) - often at very short notice. Not only does it stop others from entering due to the limited places available, it reduces the money raised for charity. Maybe next year I'll have to switch to pre-payment, even if players don't turn up it won't reduce the money going to charity.
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