Here's the $80 from the tournament plus my own $20 prize.

If you're wondering, Scott is my dad. Big props to him for helping out at the tournament!

That's pretty cool, James.

This is a great idea.  I actually got a picture like this of me and the crowd from Utah, and I'm sure I'll look back on it a lot over the years.  Maybe we could even plan a non-tournament meetup for sometime in the next couple of weeks and just all hang out and play games together.

As I pledged at the tournament.

We gotta take a group picture of everyone that took part/or is apart of the tournament next time. I'd like to look back on it someday.

TEAM JUMPFORCE!!!!!!!

I got a video of the tournament, too!

Keby and DDRCoder show off their AWESOME ITG Skillz	Small | Large

I just assumed those were his pajamas.

Someone showed up to the Pajama Bowl in a Darth Vader outfit. No one asked questions.

So, wtf is with Darth Vader?

hey everyone, here are the pictures i took at the tournament. I uploaded the videos of my two matches onto my fb. (click the thumbs for larger size if needed) If you haven't seen the ones on my FB already, here they are.

So many bars...so much rape.




Sorry, I had to say it. It was for the lulz.

Thanks for taking so many videos! It's awesome to be able to go back and watch the matches.

My vids from the tournament have been uploaded to youtube Link~

And here are a couple pictures:
Entrance view
Back of the arcade view

I'd also like to mention at this time that the 25% of the tournament entry fees will be going to disaster relief in Japan (again likely through Red Cross) instead of the fund that Sleep Country's event is sponsoring. If anyone has any complaints about this, please let me know within the next 24 hours.

I don't think I've had this much fun PREPARING for a tournament as I had this one, mostly because I just never play anymore and Alan... and many others, actually, being pretty even in skill with me sparked some competitive flame in me.  I didn't really try to practice songs to pick at the tourney, I just spent more time than usual at acme chatting with people who would show up at the tournament.  I'm surprised that I placed so well, but at the same time I'm not; anybody in the expert division could have gotten top 3 with the right roll of the dice.  Met a new face or two, which is always fun

Not a lot of constructive criticism for the tourney, it was fine.  I think one division would work just fine for many reasons; one main one being what Tony said; if there's a half and half type disparity, the first round takes care of it, and the potential for upsets makes things interesting, not to mention it gives people a chance to cross over in the other division, so to say, without ACTUALLY doing it.  I do disagree with making expert 7 people last minute, but I kinda justified it within myself by saying that an 8 man standard bracket was simply cleaner.  Last minute rule changes though, no good.

Too bad UW lost to UNC though.  That was lame even though I was the only one that cared, haha.

I said it there and on facebook but I'll say it again, that I'm just donating my winnings plus some to Disaster Relief in Japan.  Probably via Red Cross.  I have a bunch of family and friends over there affected to some degree, so it's near and dear to me.  

PS: I love the overuse of single words, run-on sentences, and the misuse of semi colons.  I won't fix it though (the second semi colon in the run on sentence should be a real colon)

ITG had 15 Entrants total.

Standard finished with
1. Me
2. Andrew (not sure of forum name or if he's even on the forums)
3. Hollie
4. sfzazure
5/6. Nimm and... I can't remember, it's whoever sfzazure played right before me (I want to say Dr. Z, but I just don't remember)
Very few 11's and no 12's were chosen (admittedly, 12's were allowed for like 3 matches total) - I played one 11 all day, and it was a random tiebreaker.  Almost every match I watched/played in went to a tiebreaker, and they were often pretty close.

I hear that Expert finished with
1. Gerrak
2. James (godai/minimoos/crackoon/whatever)
3. Rudo
with NSXX, ddrcoder, Keby, and KDDR filling out the other four spots (one spot was added on the spot pulling Keby, the 7th seed, into the Expert division and making the awkward 9-man standard bracket into a cleaner 8-man bracket).

I can at least answer the questions about the DDR tournament.

There were 10 entrants in the DDR tournament, and the results were:

1st Place: James (manyminimoos)
2nd Place: Kevin (KevinDDR)
3rd Place: Allan (Gerrak)

I have a spreadsheet of the all the matches, including song choices and scores.  I'll be cleaning it up and posting it here sometime today.  There were definitely some really close matches, and I'm sad the DDR tournament didn't get more attention.  (But I guess walk-offs are fun to watch too =p)

So, what was the headcount of this event? i.e How many people entered?

Also, who were the winners?

Actually, I'll jump in with an idea Laura told me yesterday, while I'm at it.  If we must keep the two division setup, don't do it by qualifier and leave the value judgments out of it.

Run an 8-11 bracket and a 9-13 bracket, only allow entry into one (but by player's choice, set all other rules (entry fees, prize distribution percentages, everything) exactly the same (probably use different qualifiers between them).  Players enter the one they think will be more interesting to them; they might not work out to be the same size in the end, but that's because players have differing preferences.  Laura, Sara, and Suko are likely to enter the 8-11 bracket, as am I, Hollie, and possibly a few of the expert bracket players (especially given the sheer number of walk-offs that happened - the expert bracket honestly did not look that fun to me) and I know many players that were in the standard bracket would likely prefer the higher caps.  Sure, there's no single best player in the end, but there will be fierce competition in both brackets - as stated, the top players from the standard bracket would have had trouble in the expert bracket, but we are not so far removed in skill that it would have been pointless to try.  Since everything is exactly the same except the caps and qualifier, there's none of this "I play 13's therefore I'm better than you" sentiment in it - you enter the event that sounds like more fun to you.  Past opt-in divisions like this had failed mostly because the lower brackets were meant for players who were still learning to play, therefore a player from a higher division was guaranteed to win if they entered a lower division (and this always happened), but we are not in that situation anymore - we're heavily talking about players' preferences having a heavy split nowadays; I'd be interested to see a no-stakes exhibition match between the two division winners on, say, the 9-12 range, actually - I don't think you'd be able to reliably call it.

The two brackets can either be run entirely separately (e.g. one at 11am and one scheduled for 3:30pm) or the matches can be weaved together by alternating which bracket currently has a match after each match (with roughly equal entrant pools, this works out very cleanly and helps with the problem I ran into when I was up for the next 4 ITG matches and the next 2 DDR matches, since you cannot have two consecutive matches involving the same player when you weave them together).

NOTE: The difficulty ranges I've listed are there for the sake of concrete examples - there's no reason to argue about them right now, so don't.  The important bit is the idea - difficulty ranges and available song packs are implementation details that can be handled later.  The idea applies even if the two divisions are the Hustle Beach division and the Dragonforce division - the emphasis is that players can enter the event they would prefer to enter, without any attempt to say one division is somehow more important than the other.  If the two divisions were sufficiently distinct, it could even be appropriate to allow players to enter both if they so choose - the core debates were over statements of "I want to be able to play X" and "I don't want to have to play Y" that were not reconciled well, so players who can handle the full range of both should be free to attempt it if they so choose, it's just that if the ranges are almost identical, the pair of events emphasizes the overlap charts too much to be free from value judgments regarding different skill sets.

Yeah, that was me.

I need to pass gratitude to Andrew; I was a little worried when I glanced over to see that he had played Destiny against Hollie (not sure if that was his pick or random), but when we were matched up again for the finals, he did have the courtesy to ask if harder 10's would still be reasonable enough that I would neither hurt myself nor refuse to play.  Hand of Time was a great pick down that line - my bad knee wasn't any worse for it, but after so many consecutive rounds, my other leg was just too sore to hit the runs accurately in that song, which is something that would happen to anyone after playing enough.  It could have easily been the case that I just skipped the song and we went onto the tiebreaker if he hadn't asked, and I am definitely thankful for that.

The last few rounds of the standard bracket were extremely close overall, there were a lot of very tense matches all around.  Overall, there's definitely less of a spread between the standard bracket players than there would have been in past events - while there weren't any cases of both players nearly quadding the song or anything, almost every match ended in a tiebreaker and those tiebreaker usually ended with pretty small margins; it's definitely reassuring to see that things have balanced out a lot from past tournaments.

No offense to Keby, but extended the Expert bracket to 7 explicitly for Keby's benefit is a bit of a weird move (had the explicit reason been "with 15 players, bringing Keby up with make an 8 player standard bracket, which is cleaner" I could have accepted that, but day-off rule changes in general are always a little awkward).  It had been cited multiple times that the proper players would make their way into that bracket, and no one improper did, it's just that 7 players of sufficient skill came.  And even then, I don't believe Hollie's score was too far below Keby's, and mine was pretty close after that.

I definitely do not think we need to force the separation in the future, because the line was very difficult to blur; other than the frequency of 12's and 13's being far beyond what I could keep up with, watching the expert bracket did make me ask "why am I not there?" - I probably would have won no more than one or two songs against the pool of expert players (and even then, mostly by clever song choices), but my scores, even on 12's don't lag that much behind what I saw. If it had been a single 16 player double elim bracket, I still would have played for almost as long and would have been knocked out by one of the expert players after sitting in the loser's bracket for a few rounds, and that really doesn't matter to me because it still would have been fun, and short of players spamming 12's charts on me, I would have at least kept up.

After than the first round of the larger bracket (bottom 8 vs. top 8 ), you have an expert-standard split, and then more players are dropped into the loser's bracket in a fairly balanced order - it does a good job maintaining the same split that we had set out to achieve and always has.  The concern had been unnecessarily harsh stamina picks on players who can't play songs that hard, and the standard bracket rules only did a little to account for that, with players' choices doing a better job compensating than the rules did.  Since we've now proven that the players can be courteous to one another, we can address the fact that multiple people refused to enter because they had been insistent on capping at 11's instead of 12's, and then no 12's were played despite the cries of others.  If people can just settle on the idea of "it's okay if both players agree" or similar, then we won't be excluding that handful of players while still allowing 12's for the matches where they actually have any place coming up (which is not always synonymous with "late rounds").

Awesome tournament Yeah it ran until a little late but that's with a 7th person in the round robin, and running 3 different divisions.

Quick Congrats & Thanks:

James- that was the first time I ever seen you play, but you really killed that DDR tournament and got very close in the itg expert one also. Awesome work.

Tony- p.s. are you ancsik? You persevered real well to make it through to win twice in the finals, it was good facing off against you in the round we competed, hopefully we'll match up again sometime. But really good job on winning!

Allan- you trained really hard for this one, (at acme and at the gym), that's something i also do for this game. You really showed a good strategic and competitive edge, that was real cool to see and you deserved it.

KDDR- Thanks for putting this one on for us, there was ALOT of debate setting up the divisions, but the tourney itself brought alot of people together and was a lot of fun.

and to everyone else I met and got to talk to a good deal at the tourney, I'll be seeing you at ACME/sakura next month

I can't wait to get my butt kicked today!!!!

Bill was nice enough to crank up the ITG3's volume a smidge upon request tonight for the tournament.

I shall bring my video cam to at least document the finals (but hopefully more). Hope to see a lot of y'all in 9 hours or so.

Okay guys. Time to sleep now. Pads are working well at Acme, and I'm looking forward to the tournament tomorrow. See you guys there!