Monday, September 1, 2008

4.5 Week one preview

A great match up in the first weekend in Flight A as OC/Branch takes on Brookhaven who just missed out on the DCC in the Spring. Branch is the favorite but I don't think it will be easy.

In Flight B the TBar v. OC/Feldman is another matchup of DCC team of the Spring v. team who just missed out. I think it hard to pick a favorite here but probably have to go with OC in close one.

Any other good matchups? I think the rest might decide who goes to the bottom quickly but nothing all that exciting.

27 comments:

  1. I think the T Bar v. Feldman match will be interesting since many people claimed that Feldman's flight was much tougher than T Bar's last season. If T Bar wins easily, they might be able to disprove that theory.
    I can't see Brookhaven winning either singles matches against Branch, but the doubles should be close. I'm not sure how Branch is going to go through the season with such a small number of players either.

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  2. Any 3.5 babies here yet? No? B-O-R-I-N-G!!!

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  3. That had to be "The BIg Fish" writing the last post!

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  4. Really, how would you like to be Eddie with that problem? I mean the guy can't keep from stepping in his own s&^t.

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  5. I look for Nancy's team to make a good run in the fall.

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  6. yep the women's weekday 4.5 league is wide open.

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  7. Very nice. Cary has joined the dark side. Are you trying to rattle me for our match?

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  8. yep, Nancy is going down. Not like that LTF'ers, calm down!

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  9. Looks like rosters have filled out a little more. Anyone want to make revised season predictions?

    Flight A
    OC Branch
    Hackberry
    Northwood
    Brookhaven

    Flight B
    HP Pham
    OC Feldman
    Royal Oaks
    TBar

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  10. Flight A-
    HP/Loose
    OC/Branch

    Flight B-
    HP/Pham
    OC/Feldman

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  11. Who are Loose's singles players that they can win the flight? Plus, aren't all their doubles players the ones that weren't good enough to play for Branch in the spring?

    Also, I thought Hackberry lost their #1 doubles team to Brookhaven?

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  12. No -Feldman lost Ramos and Lasalle to Brookhaven.

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  13. OK. My fault. I am really not familiar with the Hackberry team at all because I've never been in their flight. I had a really close match with Federico Pier one time a few season ago. He got moved to 5.0 but I guess he's back to 4.5 now.
    With only 2 teams from each flight making it there will be a few good teams getting left out.

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  14. interesting to see that Joey Molina won an appeal on his ESR rating as he is back on the Roual Oaks roster.

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  15. I don't understand his aversion to 5.0. The guys is obviously a 5.0 player. Royal Oaks probably doesn't have a 5.0 team but still.

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  16. Molina's aversion to 5.0 is no different than several unnamed players in Dallas who have also continually appealed their rating down year after year.
    Should he be 5.0 probably so, but he also lost a few matches, so he fell within the appeal range, but also the appeal was probably filed prior to his results at Sectionals, so he will be a Benchmark 5.0 by End of Year ratings and their won't be an appeal available this time.

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  17. So does anyone know the difference between a "benchmark" player and a "computer rated" player? Is one more likely to get bumped than the other?

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  18. anyone who played a match beyond the local regular season league gets tagged with a "B", so if your team did not make it to the city playoffs you more than likely get a "C"

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  19. It used to be common perception that the B meant you were on the verge of getting bumped up when, in actuality like hacker said, it means your team made the playoffs.

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  20. Hacker...not so about your comment.

    I know our team advanced and there were a couple of guys who had a "C" rating while the all the rest received a "B" rating.

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  21. Shows what I know. Maybe it has to do with how many matches you play too. Any clarification hacker?

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  22. For the posters who made predictions about Flight A, you are not looking too good. Loose's team beats a historically mediocre Collin County team 3-2 in 5 tiebreaks and Hackberry loses convincingly 4-1 to Greenhill. Both of those teams were predicted to be playoff teams.
    I did see Loose added J.D. Miles which will help their singles but he will be inconsistently available with work and tournaments I would guess.
    I will say that was probably the best possible lineup Greenhill could have had but both of those results gave me more confidence about my team's chances.
    Now if I just knew who won the Branch/Brookhaven match.
    Anybody?

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  23. Branch beat Brookhaven 4-1, but the real story was Ramos/LaSelle calling out Kiron/Stone DURING the match for purposelly tanking! Priceless. Once again the Branch team had to be obvious about the tanking and got called out this time. Hopefully my team can do the same in a few weeks...

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  24. So you are telling me that Ramos and Lasalle LOST to a team who they said was TANKING? Does this mean they OUTTANKED them and then had the guts to call themou on tanking, or are they really just that bad? How many 4.5 teams have those guys been on again?

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  25. lol, previous post clearly a Branch player. No match result posted yet so the only people who know what happened were at that match. In fact if you have been following you rarely see a Branch result posted within 24 hours of a match since he tries to keep people from watching their results to a minimum. Branch has done a very good job of keeping Stone a 4.5. The system simply will not catch him based on his results. It's a perfect example of the glaring flaw in how the ratings work since very little human intervention takes place. Players in question should be tracked with 'intentional losing' patterns heavily punished but rather it is completely overlooked taking common sense out of the equation. Until the league/City/Section decides to finally fix this problem the system just won't work on it's own! Everyone knows this and that's most of the complaints on the blog. Anyone wanting to know how to keep your guys from getting bumped should watch how Branch does it this fall (and every season for that matter). He is the master of it and it's the reason for most criticism towards him and his team. Should they be blamed though or should the league for allowing it to continue to happen season after season, year after year?

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  26. Can't either captain enter a score?

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  27. I seriously doubt Rusty could care less about if other people see the score. He probably just doesn't get online on the weekends, just like many other captains (including Brookhaven's by the way). All any captain has to do to keep players down is to put them in situations where they will be less successful (i.e. me in doubles, or Rusty in doubles, or doubles players in singles). I was thinking about this earlier today. Is this sandbagging or tanking or just smart strategy?
    If I were undefeated at singles and in danger of getting moved up, I could put myself in doubles. I'm still going to try to win the match, but there's a lot better chance I will lose in doubles than singles.

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