I just saw that Toronto had 72 qualifying matches in November. At the Vancouver event on Dec. 12, they played 74. I’m starting to think this is the most you can do with two fields in one day. Anyone doing more than 70-ish in a one-day event? (Also, are Canadians the only ones tough enough to play 70+ in a day? 
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Oh…them be fightin’ words. 
At our event, we ran 45 matches in a period of roughly 3 hours, and then we ran the finals. We were extremely pressed for time because we had to be out by 4:45 to let the event after us set up so… :D. And we were running 2 fields. 
If we had more time, we could’ve run a 5-6 hour qualification period, and roughly doubled the match number.
We also only had 19 teams, so there was only so much we could do.
- Sunny
How long to play the matches? (3 hours - 4 - 5 hours)
How many matches had less than 4 working robots in them?
From the Woburn event in Toronto, I can also share that the event ran ahead of schedule. It finished qualification matches at least 20 minutes before the scheduled time. I’d say it’s certainly possible to play more than 70 matches in a day on two fields, however it depends on a very experienced volunteer crew (queuers, crystal handlers, and field crew especially), and a bit of luck in terms of field issues. Here are some answers based on my experience at Toronto:
How long to play the matches?
Opening ceremonies started at 9am, qualification matches actually ended shortly after 3:00pm, but were scheduled for a bit past 3:20pm.
How many matches had less than 4 working robots in them?
This is anecdotal, but I’d estimate one in every 8 matches or so would have a dead robot, or one that died during the match. This year for some reason it “felt” like every single match had a full complement of working robots. I know there were some odd matches here and there where not all 4 ran, but they were rare enough that they’re hard to recall after the fact.
The experience from around the world is that a really efficient tournament will run matches every 4.5 minutes. With 70 matches, that gives 315 minutes of tournament play, or 5 hours and 15 minutes. I’m pretty sure that Gladstone started at around 10 and finished qualifying at 4:30, with a half-hour for lunch, so 6 hours to play 74 matches, about a half-hour slower than the optimal 5 hours and 33 minutes. Most of this delay was the field crew being merciful on teams who were dealing with recalcitrant robots and the complexity of scoring autonomous with balls partially overlapping walls. Teams in the Pacific Northwest are widely spread out so we tend to start later to allow travel and to match ferry schedules. (Vancouver is about three hours from us when there are no border delays or bad weather. With a broken bus and an accident that closed all but one lane on a bridge over the Fraser River, we didn’t get to Gladstone until 9:30 – and we had planned to leave Redmond at 5:30.)
With alliance selection, eliminations, awards, and packing up, we didn’t leave the school until 8:00pm.
I can’t remember a robot not showing up on the field (although it must have happened), and there was the usual distribution of robots not turned on, receivers not plugged in, dead batteries, etc. The VEXnet robots generally worked very well, as did the crystal-controlled robots, with few exceptions. Compared to last year, reliability was about the same.