AWBW Cup Unveiled

As some of you may have noticed, a new competition has surfaced on the site today: The AWBW Cup! In case you can't be bothered to click the link and read the thread yourself, here's the Cliff Notes version: the Cup consists of a series of 16 player, single elimination tournaments with one tournament starting each month. At the outset, this might seem somewhat implausible. After all, by AWBW standards one month is the equivalent of the blink of an eye. There's a lot of games that take longer than a month to finish just by themselves, and we're going to try starting a new tournament every month? Ludicrous, surely.

AWBW tournaments have always had a few problems, which have consistently managed to halt, mangle, and generally just destroy promising tournaments. The biggest culprit is the length of time tournaments traditionally take, as I noted above. The YOLT tournament took 2 years and 5 months to finish. The Grand Tournament is 3 years deep and has been abandoned. The No Holds Barred Tournament is almost to 2 1/2 years with no sign of finishing soon. The 2nd season of DART took just shy of 2 years. Even the quickest tournaments take a long time - the AWBW Pro Classic is in the championship round after 20 months, and DART Season 3 wrapped up within a year. The length of time that it takes for tournaments to finish kills tournaments as surely as anything, as people become disinterested and the participants begin to go inactive, as well as the tournament organizers in some cases.

I have a theory about this. Tournaments take forever because the individual games themselves take a long time to complete. The games take a long time because people take a long time for their turns, and stall when they begin to lose. This happens because people take the games extra seriously, which makes sense considering that tournaments don't start very often, are fairly prestigious, and the stakes are high - if you lose, you're out. And that brings us back to the AWBW Cup.

The AWBW Cup won't be a tournament of the same style as previous tournaments on the site. The idea is that if the tournaments are started more frequently it will lower the prestige of each individual tournament, making people less likely to stall and take their games so extremely seriously. It will also make people less afraid to lose, because they can always just try again the next month. Similarly, if one tournament does stall, it's not the end of the world because there are other opportunities to play. The AWBW Cup also puts other measures in place to prevent stalling, such as Rule #10. A low boot/AET, an emphasis on casualness, and a request that players make sure they will be active when they join should help to prevent each individual tournament from stalling. Further, keeping the tournaments small and choosing a single elimination format will allow them to move along faster than in the past.

The Cup also offers another advantage over traditional tournaments. In tournaments like YOLT, the GT, and NHB, there was not much hope for players who were not among the 3-4 favorites. If you drew Hellraider or Ultra Storm in the first round, for example, you knew you were screwed. And for most players, that meant an early out, making the tournaments uninteresting and pointless to play in. But the AWBW Cup fixes this problem. Each player can only play in 2 Cup tournaments at once. While this also helps prevent multiple tournaments from stalling at once, it mainly means that not all of the top players can play in each tournament (unless each tournament finishes within 2 months, which would really need a miracle). This gives more players a chance to advance into the deeper rounds of tournaments than before, and it gives players a chance who would have never made it past the second round otherwise.

Now, this isn't to say that there's no place on the site for "old school", traditional tournaments. Obviously the big, epic tournaments (see GT), are still good to have. It just doesn't work as well when those are the only types of tournaments available. So the inaugural AWBW Cup tournament will begin on September 1st. Don't worry if you can't participate this time, because there will be plenty more to come.

Over and out,
Walker