I thought about that too Jeff, and it's probably the weakest element of these rules. It's tricky, though. There's some trade-off going on. The champ starts with a disadvantage, because he has one fewer day to play, and everybody else's scores carry over from Round 2 while his will be zero.
On the other hand, not actually having to DO anything to get to Round 3 is pretty cool, since he gets to start at a point in the tourney where the majority of the players (4 out of 7) are guaranteed a prize. His odds of finishing in the money are extremely favorable.
Maybe the champ can choose to start on Round 1 and fight his way through anyway, in order to bank a score? And if he doesn't get through Round 1 or 2, he still has "immunity" and plays Round 3 regardless?
Since I've had more time to think about this than the rest of you, I've noticed some other things.
The Round 1 bye goes to the top 3 in each tournament, and any "repeaters" get the bye based on their highest-scoring tournament.
This means that some people can benefit, or get screwed, in interesting ways, based on how the tourneys play out.
Let's imagine that the standings end up like this (fake names - bolds get the Round 1 bye):
Tournament #1
1 Bob 990
2 Pete 950
3 Sam 880
4 Jim 860
5 Todd 830
Tournament #2
1 Bob 995
2 Alex 975
3 Joe 970
4 Ray 940
5 Matt 920
6 Ron 900
Tournament #3
1 Max 820
2 Dick 800
3 Jeff 795
In the second tourney, Bob improved his score by 5K, which means that Jim, who came in fourth during the first tournament, now qualifies with his 860K score because Bob's score in the first tourney no longer counts, which retroactively "upgrades" Jim to 3rd place for tourney #1.
But notice how Ray got 940K in the second tournament, which beat both Sam and Jim's first tourney scores by a lot, but Ray doesn't get a spot because he came in 4th in his tourney. Matt and Ron also get screwed here because they're ahead of Sam and Jim too.
The third tourney has weak scores, but that could happen. Maybe not as dramatic as my example, but it could. Could have a low turnout for some reason, or nobody has it together that day, or whatever, and the top scores in that tourney are significantly lower than in the other two.
Now Ray, Matt, and Ron are screwed even worse (and Todd from tourney #1 gets screwed too). Max, Dick, and Jeff in the third tourney get to qualify simply because the third tourney ended up being softer.
So Ray can end up being the fifth highest player overall by score, yet not be among the nine who get the Round 1 bye!
I don't think this situation is particularly unlikely either. In fact, odds are good that it probably WILL happen to at least one person, whose score will get caught in the gears in this way.
I pointed that out to John and Eric - that if you work from three independent score lists and just go by 1st, 2nd, 3rd on each it ends up being very possible for players with lower scores to take the "skip Round 1" spots from players with higher scores.
According to them though, they DID think about it, and it was intentional. And I can see the merit of doing it this way. It just changes the tournament strategy in certain ways, and adds a "twist" element.
It's also interesting that anybody in 4th, or 5th, is technically on "standby" until all three tourneys have played out, because any of the top 3 repeating in a later tourney (but with a lower score than their best) would bump the standby spots into the qualifier spot.
