Quartered 6 was ambitious for its size, since we were running two very non-standard events (ie, GNG crews and swiss pools), implementing UCF for the first time, and still sticking to a very tight schedule. The primary goals of the event for me were:

1) Ensure a good experience for the newer players, beyond simply "get to play a lot of sets"
2) Run pools more quickly than last time
3) Have the event be less stressful for me personally

Unfortunately, the event wasn't able to deliver on all of its promises; most notably, we had to cancel GFs of crews. My apologies to everyone involved. We had some unforeseen constraints that meant even less setup time than usual, but apart from that, the scheduling was still off. Another lesson learned!

My hope for the event was that using swiss would help towards all three of the goals above. And it did! It was easy to run, more orderly than RR, and much faster. What was really interesting about it though was the dynamic element it added to pools. With RR, you know exactly what to expect going in, and (as a mid-level player) you often only play 1-2 relevant sets. With swiss it's more like you're in a bracket, and getting to play others of a similar skill to you is a huge upside (for both lower and mid-level players, IMO).

There's a downside of course, which is that with such a small sample size, swiss is less "fair" than RR. Part of this was a problem with the exact setup we used (16 people, 5 rounds), which was obviously sub-optimal and led to a few people being randomly punished or advantaged. But even with a better setup, if your goal for pools is to feed bracket accurately, I don't recommend swiss (for an event on this scale at least). That wasn't my goal, so I was less fussed about the outcome, but hopefully this info is useful to others!

To give a concrete example of what I'm talking about: after 4 rounds, there are a wedge of players on 2-2 records. Swiss tries to pair them up with people adjacent to them, so the "better" players play eachother and the "worse" ones also play eachother. So if the goal is to go 3-2, then the better players have a more difficult placement match than the worse ones! This is clearly wrong and I will be looking for ways to mitigate it.

After the ABYSMAL amateur bracket at Quartered 5, I was extremely happy to have a 13-person bracket this time around (this was part of goal #1). I don't think the wonky seeding of pro bracket affected things too extremely, and we even had time to run a couple more bo5 sets than last before. Winners' finals was very exciting, but I can't take credit for that (can I?).

Finally (and importantly), I want to thank everyone for being supportive. People brought setups, people brought UCF. People stayed where they were supposed to be, played their matches, and reported them! It sounds simple but it all helps immensely. Shais, Hylian Likely, and CptNebula all helped me run the event and were phenomenal. This is the second Quartered in a row that's sold out and I couldn't be happier about it.