A seed company could run a thousand seeds to find a cup winner that is amazing, but if most of the plants are mediocre people popping a few seeds are going to feel ripped off.
I think this sort of thing is actually pretty common. I can't tell you how many posts I've seen from people growing cup winning strains who said that they just got bad hermies, poor yield or potency, and were hugely disappointed saying it just wasn't worth the effort.
In some cases the buds actually winning the cup are from a unique pheno that you're just probably not going to find in any given pack.
In some cases "name" genetics of an older winning cup (eg White Widow, Northern Lights, Jack Herer) simply probably aren't the same as the ones that won the cup years ago, via drift, loss, etc.
In rare cases, the whole exercise was probably a fraud. . .IE the buds that the judges smoked are entirely unrelated to the genetics the breeder puts in the packs.
A better contest would be to have seed companies send a pack to a designated grower and have them grow them out and have the winners picked from the results
That would be a little better, but it would still be imperfect, and its not really practical anyway.
All the losers would just claim that their particular strain wasn't grown right. . .and you know what. . .in many cases it would be a legitimate complaint. Some of these strains are picky and take some experience to grow right. The proper cure on these things may vary from strain to strain (some continue to get better with age. . .some don't). You can't expect someone growing plants one time to dial in a potentially cup winning performance for each of 30 different strains the very first time! Then, different strains need different handing for curing. Some buds peak quickly in the jar while others benefit from prolonged aging.
With any contest there is an issue of who the judges are. Are magazine editors and/or celebrities really the best cannabis judges? Even if they are, when you go to a bar and order a beer, do you want the beer some panel of beer "experts" likes the most, or the one *YOU* like the most?
Bluntly, I think the whole concept of cannabis cups is flawed. So much of this is just subjective. Most of the contests aren't open to all comers, and realistically, there are only so many strains a given panel can fairly evaluate in a few days. EG, how much "taste" is going to come through after you've already smoked five joints that day? The first "cut" the judges typically do is just look and smell. So a lot of that is judging the trim and cure, and not necessarily the actual strain. That's fair. . .you do have to make exclusions somehow, but in certain cases a really great strain that gets entered late, and isn't cured or manicured properly might get overlooked.
I'd also argue pretty strongly that because of tolerance, persistent cannabinoid receptor agonism, and other issues if you really want to judge effect/high quality, you can't fairly judge more than a few strains per WEEK, effectively making this factor impossible to judge in any conventional contest. Sure, you can simply look at the THC analysis numbers, but that's not really much of a "contest", is it? If a particular strain has a unique cannabinoid profile, that may get overlooked in a contest where its the 4th or 5th strain of the day the judges are trying.
And no judging of just
buds is ever really take into account all of the other factors important in choosing a strain: Yield, ease of growth, phenos, hermie-tendency, disease/pest resistance, etc. That's why picking a strain just because it won last years cup is just foolish.
Bottom line, contests attract attention, and they sell beans. At BEST they identify some of the best buds, but that's not quite the same thing as the best strains.
