Leonard's aoe2 Invitational for November 2023
Welcome everyone, to Leonard’s Swiss Style Invitational!
Location: Remote and/or Fargo Date: November 17-19 Weekend before thanksgiving Tournament Style: Swiss Style with a top 4 championship.
Rules. Every contestant plays the other opponent two times. A win results in one point for the player. Playoffs: Top four players with the most points advance to the playoffs, 4/5 tiebreakers will be determined by head to head and then by 1 game sudden death Arabia. Max amount of players: 8 Map: Each player picks a map beforehand to play from a pool of preselected maps. Map Bans: Each player can ban one map from being selected in the tournament against them for each player. Civ Picks: Players can pick any civ they like as much as they want to, but cannot select the same civ twice in a series. Civ Bans: Each player can ban 2 civs for each opponent.
Top 4 players will play a best-of-five series with existing map bans and civ bans. 1 seed vrs. 4 and 2 vrs 3.Then the winners face off in a best of 5 with same rules.
Map Pool: Arabia, Arena, Hideout, Four Lakes, Gold Rush, Enclosed, Fortress, Oasis.
Pros of Swiss Style: Everybody gets to play everybody. No need for a losers bracket. No useless waiting for loser's bracket in double elimination. This will be a really nice way of establishing the pecking order, also we can get a lot of matches in quickly. We can get the preliminary matches out of the way first in the previous weeks.
Cons: Can be confusing for first time participants. People stuck in their ways prefer the easy-to-understand bracket formula.
My aim is to have the swiss matches played out within a month before the weekend of November 18th. Then sometime between November 17-19th we have the top four matches playout, people are not usually traveling the weekend before thanksgiving so it be the best viewing experience. If there’s 6 people or less I think swiss style is the best. Everybody gets 10 matches in which sounds like a lot, but then only two people play beyond that.
My biggest thoughts for a successful Tournament: Most important is that we come to an agreement that gets #1 A completed tournament in a timely fashion, i.e. lets not drag this out. #2 Get the prelimanary games finished before Saturday so that Top 4 playoffs can happen with a full audience. For those in playoffs please reserve a full day to complete both rounds. The amount of games played in the prelims is 10 which is not bad. For the playoffs it could be a total of 10 games in one day which could be a lot, but also very achievable. There will be a google spreadsheet created beforehand for all of the map and civ bans to streamline things. Also am thinking of sponsoring a prize pool of $200 to help maintain interest and focus.