What Are The Best Strategies for getting weaker tourney servers?

You look at the region your server is in e.g. Europe, what time people will typically join e.g. school closing, end of work day, work lunch.. noting the multiple time-zones in the region, then the probability curve of the rate that they'll join and when the mega teams are likely to join and form a view of the optimum time window. I've done this four times now and can happily report that the strength of the shard was completely random.

Sometimes I got top 5, others top 100.