In the opening round, I was curious to see how the cover tunes would fare. I didn't make an exact count, but there were somewhere close to 60 non-original tracks in this tournament. The Beatles released 25 or so during their career, and with the Anthology and BBC releases, 35 or more new cover tunes were added to the canon. I MAY have missed one, but my quick review of the 105 tracks that made it to this round revealed only two that survived: "Twist And Shout" and "Roll Over Beethoven". Other stalwarts, like "Long Tall Sally" and "Money" bit the dust. None of the BBC tracks even got close; even the standouts like "The Hippy Hippy Shake" and "Soldier Of Love" were tossed.

I also looked to see if the ANTHOLOGY series placed any among the survivors. Once again, I may have missed one, but I don't think so; it looked liked all those song, including "Not Guilty" and "If You've Got Trouble", were shown the door.

After the field is cut to 40, I'll try to do a breakdown of how the songs from individual albums are faring.

In case anyone cares about how the matchups were done this time, we had six groups that had ties for the final position. Three had only two tied for sixth, and three others had a trio tied for the last rung. So, I jotted down the numbers of the groups for all six of those, and then pulled at random the numbers of the other 10 groups to pair up with those six, and the remaining four were also paired at random. In the next round, I'll start mixing up the survivors, so a track won't have to continue to face the same opponents round after round.