Original idea (and the youthful slang of "smoke") from Anna Bright's newsletter: [https://brighterpickleball.beehiiv.com/p/women-don-t-matter-enough-at-mlp-fed6](https://brighterpickleball.beehiiv.com/p/women-don-t-matter-enough-at-mlp-fed6) I took this, looked at the data, and ran with it to see when we might see men v. women matched up in DreamBreakers. 

tl;dr

* Left to pure optimization, Bright's format never produces man v. woman: the safe board pairs like with like, and all 176 lineup cards on record sort Man 1, Man 2, Woman 1, Woman 2.
* If a team changes the ranking of its own four players, the matchup falls out for free. Not as a stunt, as the correct lineup.
* This weekend proved the demand. Waters against Ben Johns on FS1 was billed as the league's best woman v. its best man, and it delivered. The 5s' board was optimal anyway; the marquee cost them nothing.
* In a DreamBreaker, creating one on purpose is a trade. The swap moves two people and creates two equal gaps, and your opponent decides which one gets featured (slot 1, twelve points) and which gets buried (slot 4, eight).
* The price is one number: how far apart your second man and your best woman really are. That, plus whether their weak man is beatable, gives you a 2x2: the Free Roll, the Big Swing, Nothing to Lose, and Paying Full Price.
* The old 5s already paid full price, running Waters second under the current format. The math won. It always does.
* Bright's format doesn't make the smoke mandatory. It makes it available, every DreamBreaker, for both teams. Whether we get it comes down to whether an owner thinks the moment is worth a couple points of win probability.

Part 2 of the DreamBreaker Reimagined: When could we see men v. women matchups?