Polo Invitational Sunday 2nd September

The aim of this tournament is to raise the level of play across the rest of the UK (i.e. outside london).
We hope this Regional/North&West Invitational will be an informal variant of the London League that will help the non-London teams hone their competitive/tournament skills.
So we would like to encourage other cities to host their own over the winter. Get planning people.

This is very good and encourageing and just what me and some MCR bods have been talking about this year and have also had a session in April over 2 days. It was really good and I think the MCR team in question benefitted a great deal. It wasn't a tournament but just repeated games of around 5 hours of play over 2 days which was a good concentration of play. The fact that we kept playing over and over again in a non-tournament fashion mean't the pressure was off to do well in each game and take time to think about play and be experimental and have a throw-in approach to the event but with focus on development as a team.

As much as I love tournaments I find them frustrating from a playing point of view: so the less exprienced teams get knocked out quickly in the elimination rounds and don't get to play again while the more experienced teams move through the elimination playing more games and ultimately get more experience as a team. While one competiton might not provide one team with a huge amount of extra play, over the course of one season or the lifetime of that team it really adds up in terms of quality polo time and the less experienced teams miss out big time, tournaments stretch out the skill gaps between teams.

If we want to raise the level of play across the non-London UK scenes then I think we shouldn't have another 'tournament' this weekend but more a polo camp/ training sesson approach, we could do a round robin so that everyone plays equal number of games and are not left out towards the end of the day. Perhaps an elimnation between the top four teams for fun.

Tournaments determine skill levels, throw-ins are where the learning happens. Anyway, this is Birminghams event but that's my 2 pence.