Jeff Dawson (England) eyes a long roquet attempt. Photo by Eileen Soo.
In the much-anticipated Bamford vs. Essick match, Essick hit only one of five long shots, and Bamford won with two sextuple peels. All eight seeds advanced to the quarterfinals, some needing to play two matches to get there. While the conditions are fairly easy, it is nonetheless impressive that 28 of 34 games today included a successful peeling turn of three or more peels, including three sextuples and three quads.
PHOTO GALLERY | CROQUETSCORES KNOCKOUT
SEEDING THE MAIN KNOCKOUTS: The usual practice in CA events is to seed only the top four or eight entries and draw the rest randomly. In this year’s Open Doubles there were 17 pairs and four seeds. In the Open Singles, 22 players qualified to the knockout, with eight seeds. When there are byes, the byes are not necessarily allocated to the seeds. Instead, byes are arranged so that all players (or all but one, if there is an odd number) start playing right away. Furthermore, seeding is based not on qualifying results or by ranking, but is done subjectively by a seeding committee. While this is very different from the usual American practice of seeding based on block results, it is a valid approach as long as the seeding committee rely on objective data (ranking, prior tournament results). The two seeding methods simply have different goals. In the American practice, the goal is to treat block and playoff results as unified parts of the same event. With the British method, the goal is a balanced knockout draw.