Great idea, where do we vote Fred?

No offense, but the problem with this whole concept is the initial matchups. Some of them lean heavily on either one watch or the other of the two in most cases. I'd like to see an 806 Navitimer go up against a modern Navitimer, early Transocean against a later Tranocean, early Unitime against a later Unitime, an early Chronospace against a later Chronospace, a Chronomat 769 against a Chronomat B01, well you get the point. Some of the pairs aren't even close to being comparable. Chrono's against chrono's, non-chrono's against non-chrono's, early dive watches against later dive watches. Let's compare apples to apples vs apples to oranges. Vintage watches have a smaller following than newer pieces and, correspondingly, most forum followers have never had a vintage piece in their hands to make an intelligent comparison. You're going to vote what you know. Anyway, it's always interesting to follow but the outcome is usually predictable.

Don't know if you were following how we got to this point Paul, but I asked people to nominate ways for the match ups to be done which resulted in three proposed approaches:

1) Random as last year
2) By category
3) By category with a 'champions' round'

We then had a vote for the three above along with the opportunity to include / exclude last year's winner (Navi 01) for each choice. Random including last year's winner got more votes than every other option combined so that's what we did. The match ups are skewed in some cases because they are random - I plugged the list of submissions into random.org which sorted them in random order and then I simply matched 1 with 64, 2 with 63, 3 with 62, etc.

Guess I didn't catch any of that. Problem with random is we can have Ferrari's going up against Fiat's. The only votes the Fiat's will get are from the most die hard Fiat aficionados. I mean, seriously, it makes much more sense to go by category imho where we have definite comparisons based upon the function and design of the watch. Ok, I'm done, back to my coffee.

some really surprising results

Unitime vs. SuperOcean and the SO gets more votes ?

And how about a Top Time 810 over the 765 AVI Copilot?