> doctorworm is making impressive progress, considering he lost almost all the preliminaries. What's all that about?

It's actually not too surprising when you look at what happened. There's always a few people who give up halfway through the preliminaries and stop playing, giving some people an easy Qualifying round even if they didn't necessarily place at the top of the rankings. Then there's the people who pretend to stop playing for a round or two, and then suddenly come back with several hunrded gold (usually pouring a lot of it into maxing out temp. enhancements) and multiple stat point updates, making hell for a qualifying opponent that gets caught off-guard. (Of course, if you spend too much playing failsafe, you won't have enough for the tougher opponents later on...)

My Qualifying opponent didn't update on Prelim #7, and my Elim #1 opponent did the same thing in the ~Qualifying Round~ (a risky move, but if you know you're far enough above the cutoff you can do it), fortuantely they didn't spend their extra gold all that wisely or I would've been even worse off, but even so I did drop a few spots in the rankings (meanwhile, people like goombus lucked out and got two people who stopped updating for a few rounds... and then didn't come back. I want those opponents! heh) It's really just luck of the draw; droopy just got some real bad luck this round. And here I was wondering if he'd beat me in the Quarterfinals or so and go on to win the whole tournament... then again, could still happen, heh.

In niel's case, I think it was just that at some point, you really do need to start putting points into HP. It starts to become a tougher call once each HP bonus costs more than 40 or 50 gold, but when you can up your HP by 20 for less than the cost of upping your permanent defense by 1...

At any rate, the worm is certainly not one to be underestimated, as he's been around for a while and has one tournament win under his belt. I think eventually, like arawn's 6-6 quarterfinals run a few months back, his lack of funding early on is going to catch up to him, but hey, he made it this far.

Me, I was just hoping I wouldn't have to start facing top-10-ranked opponents this early :/ That repeat chance seems to be slipping further away with every round, heh...