by Dukasaur on Sat Oct 21, 2017 3:13 pm
I don't expect anybody except the hard-core competitive types to join all of them.
If you do join all of them, I expect your peak game load to be in the neighbourhood of 45 games or fewer. For serious tournament players who often carry 3-digit game loads, that's not much. If you're a casual player who tries to keep their game load under 50 or whatever, I guess 45 is a lot. Still, as noted, you don't have to join all of them. I'm only joining the ones on maps that I like. I don't expect to finish in the Top 10 overall or anything like that, I'm doing it just for fun.
Just as an anecdotal note: I just went through my games. I currently have 86 active tournament games, and only 7 of those are USA Supertournament games, or about 8% of my tournament game load. This, despite the fact that I'm in 9 USA Supertournament tournaments. So, I've joined more than half of the tourneys so far, and yet it's making a really trivial contribution to my overall game load. How come only 7 games with 9 tournaments going? Well, in any round, the bulk of the games finish in the first week or two. The bulk of any round (chronologically speaking) consists of most games being finished and a small minority of games that are taking longer than normal. In other words, most of your time in any tournament is taken up with all of your games being done, and waiting for a tiny few to catch up. (This is true of any tournament, not just these.)
My current situation, having only 7 active games across 9 tournaments, may be a bit extreme, but for anyone I don't expect that you will ever have more than half of your games active. So, being in nine tournaments with three games per round, I wouldn't expect more than 13 or 14 active games at most. That would be a pretty trivial contribution to my overall game load in any case.
If you choose to join ALL the tourneys (and once again I don't expect most people would) then I estimate your game load would never be more than 45. Math, as follows: Average tournament to end in 30 weeks, so peak load would be 30 tournaments. Each tournament has 3 games per round, for a potential total of 90 games. The actual active games in a tournament are rarely more than half of potential, so at no point would I expect your game load to be over 45. Most of the time, I would expect it to be less than that.
When the CC Olympics were at their peak, I had a lot more than 45 Olympics games going, and I assume a lot of the the people posting here did, too. When the Great War was at its peak, shoop76 (the only person I know who was committed to playing in every Great War tournament) had more than 250 games going in that series. He said he found that a bit high, but of course it was only for a couple months until those slowed down.
When designing the USA Supertournament, I made sure to keep it down to 3 games per round because I did all this math beforehand and I didn't want anyone to have to carry more than 50 games at a time, and I'm pretty sure nobody will. As for myself, my new target for this year was to keep my overall game load below 100, so I haven't joined all of these. Only the ones on maps I really like. Like I said, I'm currently in 9 of them and as of today have only 7 active games in those nine, so it's a really, really trivial contribution to my overall game load. I'm sorry, but I think people are really exaggerating how many games you are likely to have in this series.
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire