Though I noticed the brackets I thought they had no bearing how one was supposed to vote. In addition, I thought the finalist numbers were arbitrarily assigned without regard to rank and that the contestant out of numerical order of appearance was merely done to eliminate any favoritism by their finalist number. I honestly had no idea we were supposed to only vote between the two contestants appearing in each bracket. I'm betting many other voters as well were unaware of the bracketed voting setup or its rules either. I merely applied the same rules given to the Yamaha judges in their initial selection process, and gave all my votes to who I felt the top 2 arranger kb players of everyone appearing in each round. A bit late in the contest to discover only now, but thank you Jonathan for taking the time to explain in detail the "bracket play" voting rules. Yamaha should have really included these voting rules on the page where people actually vote.