Believe it or not I just got my first win via time.  Feel kind of terrible about it but oh well I guess.

Oh. Okay then. I thought we were finished actually and had forgotten all about it. What a nice surprise to see a new game come up for me.

Only 1 game left in Round 2 now (over 11 months so far).  Then 24-25 players get to start Round 3.  My daughter might graduate from High School before this is done. 

Let's adjust the estimated end date to 2014, shall we?

We've been in round 1 for 10.5 months. Round two is taking 7 months so far, but those last 8 games will not be fast, some pairs have not yet finished their first game!!

If we assume round 2 will take 10 months, we'll advance to round 3 in early October. Then we'll have 32 people left. To reduce that to 18 or so, another 9 months (it will probably speed up a bit, as there is a chance the biggest slowpokes will be eliminated by time-out). Round 4 then starts June 2011.

Let's book 8 months for round 4, so February 2012 we start round 5 with 10odd people. 7 months later, August 2012, we have 5-6 left. Early 2013 we have 3-4, and halfway 2013 we get the grand final between the last two. Approximate end time: early 2014

Uh Oh!!!  I was afraid of this!!!  It looks like the Custom Trophies I had set up for this tournament didn't save correctly.    Super Thanks go out to Erik who finally got the staff to display the Custom Trophies on the tournament Home Pages!!!  But unfortunately, now that I can see the trophies set up for each tournament, this one doesn't have anything displayed under 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place.    So I think when this is all said and done, the winners will just have the normal Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals to display in their Trophy Showcase (which will of course still make any showcase look good  ).

Hooray!!  We're finally into Round 2!! 

That only took 10 and a half months. 

Good Luck Everybody!!  Have Fun!!

By the way, we'll have a large number of rounds with this setup, so December 2010 is waaay too early :p

We started with 100; only two people in each group. The first round will see 54-55 people advance 9and takes half a year). Round two: 54 people will be reduced to about 30. Round three: 15-20 still standing after that one. Round four will then be survived by 8-12 people, round five by 4-8. Round seven is the first one where we might see a winner, but it could also end up being round 8 or even 9, depending on how many advance due to splitting the points.

For the record, with 4-6 months / round, we'd be done by early 2012, give or take a year . (unless the next rounds will have more people / group, don't know if that's decided by round or all in advance)

For anyone who wants to stay tuned on this tournament's progress, I've started a blog/thread for it:

http://www.chess.com/groups/forumview/custom-trophy-tournament

I'm guessing December 2010....

Here we go.  Good Luck Everybody!!  Anyone want to take guesses on when this will actually be done?  LOL.

good luck to you guys too and every one else

good luck everyone

Wow !!

What a funny tournament...

It seems good to be a turtle... haha!!

Good luck everyone!

This is a SUHWEEEEEET tournament !!!