Sexton wrote that due to the structure of this stage of the tournament, there were major play issues. Mainly, you had to get people to lose matches in a particular order to advance, sometimes requiring you to fold the nuts. Since there were a small number of matches, many people ended up not playing good poker, but trying to make the players in a tournament go out in a particular order. Mike mentoins the issue and suggest a solution in
this article.
I'm not really clear why 4 handed play would be so much better than 6 handed play. What are you hoping to see here?