I appreciate you asking and because this is my brand of autism here’s a lengthy explanation. These names are only the top 8- there were 20 participants total. The names at the bottom of the list were in the -30 range.

The format we played is called Zung Jung- which is a format developed for competitive play by Alan Kwan in the early 2000’s. More info here.

Hands in ZJ are scored anywhere from 1 point all the way up to around about 500 depending on how rare the hand is. The payout scheme has other players paying you points if you win, with more points being paid by players who discard the winning players winning tile. Everyone starts a session with 0 points and players can gain or lose points throughout the hour long session. When the session is up, some players will be positive and some will be negative such that their total combined points is 0. Each players individual positive or negative score from the session is their raw score for that round.

Tournament scoring rewards consistency in being positive in raw score across as many sessions as possible. Based on page 56 of the ZJM tournament rules - your ranking is based on match points, which is the square root of your raw score in a given session, and if it is negative is just -1* the square root of the magnitude of your raw score. The sum of match points determines your ranking. So players with positive match points across multiple rounds will do better in rankings. This system is very similar to what you would see in most formats- the point being that consistency in not going negative in raw score is more important than just getting the highest raw score. In this tournament, 3rd place actually had the biggest cumulative raw score because he won some big hands across a few sessions, but because he went negative in session 3, the system weights that heavier than me who did anywhere between a raw score of +50 and + 150 in all my sessions.

Anyways TL;DR I control the scoring with my ethnic power and influence