> Oh, I just figured if I'm going to take one guy out, it's going to be the character named after him.
>
> Yea, I'm working on stripping out the preliminary results from the point totals of all the champions, since I think comparing the points earned in the elimination rounds is a more valid comparison. But you're right, Bobby's number will have an asterix because you couldn't increase your HP until Game 3.

Ahh. Hmm, I dunno about using only the Elim rounds though. Take last month for example; somehow I managed to get an opponent as far in as Elim Round #2 that hadn't been actually updating (although, the two before that came back after skipping the last couple of days, to my surprise, heh). You may know what's coming in the Preliminaries, but you can generally count on the computer to actually put up a fight; conversely, sometimes the first couple of elimination rounds are freebies, while other times the qualifying round can be troublesome even if you did well in the prelims.

As an interesting side note about that, I've noticed over the last few tournaments that it seems like the "best" position to be in is 2nd or 3rd, a few points behind the leader. There's always one or two guys who spend a lot of points on HP and end up doing worse than the ones who give up and stop updating, despite the fact that they're much stronger from assigning stat points and buying weapons (Although I got lucky this time in that mikek put so much into HP that he barely had any for weapons).

Of course, the Prelims can be highly varying as well, and doing well there doesn't necessarily mean you're going to do well against human opponents.

I guess it's just hard to judge exactly what it is that separates an easy set of opponents, luck, or just straight up skill, heh.