pop-pop Tournament

No, I'm not hosting a tournament–not yet, anyway. I just have a question: If you could host or participate in a pop-pop tournament, how would you have it be run? Would you make it a single-elimination bloodbath from the start, or would you have an initial 'novelty' round to see how players should be paired? Would you have a playoff round? Etc... etc...

I'd like you to be as detailed as you like. Thanks. 🙂

I almost forgot to mention: How would you handle specific rules, like match reporting or cheating?

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I'm hosting a tournament right now (Pop-Pop WorldCup) - it is teamplay, 4 teams of 3 players who have to play against each other - a single match between 2 teams = 9 Pop-Pop games. Team with most wins (5 or more) is declared winner of the match - and earns 1 point. When all 6 inter-team matches have been played the team with most wins (up to 3) is declared winner of the tournament.

Positive:

  • a team can perform even if you loose some games.
  • because each player has to play 9 games in all (9 different opponents), you are in for a long time and are not eliminated in a few minutes.
  • you can learn from your team-mates what tactics to use vs a specific opponent... there is a lot of tactics discussed.

The drawback is to get all players who joined to actively participate in the tournament. If one player fails to show-up you whole tournament grid screws up - same if somebody withdraws (e.g. when he gets beaten constantly and gets pissed off to continue).
Another drawback is 'logistics' :
1- submitting scores (by e-mail in this case - 54 results to submit & update)
2- central coordinator work load is heavy
3- finding your opponents on the tracker, in this tournament we have 7 players in Europe, 5 in North America making it difficult to coordinate for timing of play.

Otherwise the concept works and is great because you really get involved in the tournament. This is the first tournament I organise and will draw my conclusions when it has ended. In an ideal scenario I'd like to extend the tournament to 8 teams - two groups of 4 teams, where the 2 top teams of each group would play in a semi-final, then a final ... but that would mean you would have to handle 135 single Pop-Pop games in the whole tournament.

To see in more details how this tournament works, check http://www.http://users.skynet.be/bk288494/poppop.html

To answer your question on death match, it's a good concept but a tournament could mean just one game for some players, which is not very motivating. Would love to see a tournament feature in PopPop itself 🙂

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