I am surprised at the comments on this topic. I'm even more surprised by some of the people making some of the comments, as some of you have actually said someting sensible from time to time.
No wonder this sport goes nowhere, with so many being so self interested.
How about looking at this from the other side of the fence and imagine for a moment that you are trying to run a Tournament?
You work out how many entries you need, at what entry fee, to offer prize money which will be attractive enough to hopefully get enough entries to pay the prize money. You'll notice that that's a closed circuit.
If everyone, before they entered, wanted to know if you had enough entries to guarantee at least most of the prize money before they entered, would you believe you'd never get the first entry, and, of course you'd never get the second one either.
I was putting on a Tournament at Ballina, I think in 1996, and made it my policy not to give out information on entries when people rang to enquire. I think I had set the number of entries at 40 to guarantee all prize money (which was top money for the price of entry).
Someone, I have forgotten who, but from Brisbane or the Gold Coast, got my partner on the 'phone and insisted on knowing and was told we had, I seem to remember, 22 entries.
He immediately pulled out, so then we had 21. Then 2 or 3 of his mates pulled out when he told them, so then we had 18 or 19.
Then some others heard about it and we dropped to 13. To top it all off, I met other bowlers later at other tournaments who told me that they were going to enter, but when they heard how few entries we had, they decided not to.
Despite all this, I think we ended up with 32 entries with more from Sydney and Newcastle than from Brisbane or the Gold Coast, and to keep faith with those who had kept faith with me, I paid the full listed prize money.
I did not run any more tournaments.
With the entries we got, plus the entries we had lost through selfishness and stupidity we almost certainly would have had over 50 entries, with a consequent increase in prize money.
I think you should all think again, and stop congratulating each other on how righteous you are, and ask yourselves why anyone running a tournament has any incentive to tell the truth about entry numbers and also ask yourselves why the 'hell' you want to know anyhow?
Also, try to imagine how well you could organise the actual running of any event (which is often the subject of criticism) when it's almost always a 'mystery' or a 'secret' on how many participants you actually have until the event is about to start.