What made Mars a special tournament was format. No pools, no double elimination. These formats don't let everyone play the teams they want to play. Mars was a free-for-all. Ken Scott would create a grid; along the top he would list the teams and along the side he'd list the game start times for the first two days of the tourney. Then he'd fill in the grid with field numbers. If your team had a field number on a particular spot in the grid, that meant you played on that field at that time shown on the left hand side. Your opponent is the other team with the same field number for that start time. No field number for your team at a start time represents a bye. Ken would put teams together based on geography, requests, and whatever else he dreamed up that worked. Result: you played five games against an interesting mix of teams for two days. The third day (this was July fourth, a long weekend) was devoted to playoffs in a standard single elimination format.

New Mars will follow this format, but it will be bigger: 20 teams, and two consolation brackets of eight and four teams each.

Figuring standings after the first two days was always a nightmare. Win-loss record would be the first factor; if you had a tough schedule, too bad. Then there was always a group of teams with similar records straddling the top eight cut-off, and figuring out who qualified was a nightmare with all kinds of tie break rules and some basically unjust events possibly falling out of it. In one case a small team all the way from Madison, Wisconsin, barely lost to three top teams but won its other games, one of which against another top-eight team who got there with an easier schedule. So, by the rules, Madison failed to qualify while the team they beat did. Miraculously, the team with the legal right to the playoffs agreed to an intermediate playoff to five and went on to win it all. Gotta love Mars.

For New Mars, this fiasco will be avoided with the help of a portable computer (gotta love the 90's.) Eric Simon has volunteered to supply his college team rating software, and this will replace the list of tie-break rules to determine team rank throughout the first two days of play. The computer calculates team ratings based on record including who beat who, by how much, and what their rating was. This calculation is iterated until the result is stable (each iteration causes changes in ratings that effect the next iteration...). It's the same system that ranks college basketball teams. There is no bias; it's completely fair so long as the web of interconnections between who plays who is entirely connected. If you have separations in the web, like you would if you had separate pools, it wouldn't work because the computer wouldn't have a basis to rank across pools. Making the web properly interconnected is just a question of making sure that a path exists where team A plays team B who plays team C who plays team D and so on that reaches every team in the tournament. You can't have a mini-pool off to the side whose teams only play each other. We'll make sure the web is properly interconnected.

What's terrific about it is that it works really well. Imagine the worst case that you play teams ending up first through fifth and lose every game but are really team number six. With the computer system you still make the playoffs seeded sixth because your margins losing to teams 1 through 5 were smaller than that of teams 7 and below. Those teams got little positive credit for beating the really weak teams. Whereas, ranking by record would place you unfairly at the bottom.

An exciting fallout of this system will be the active leader board. We will run the program after each round of play and post the results at the Information Booth. Your team will start out unranked and after each round of play your calculated rank becomes more accurate. As each round is played your task is to climb the leader board into the top eight and get as high as you can to earn the best possible playoff match-ups. This is a first in ultimate and it should be pretty damn exciting.

This new competition format for New Mars makes this tournament exciting and unique.