By Tony Cannon
June 21, 2001
B5 is expected to have near-overwhelming attendance. 37 people have signed up internationally, including 8 from Japan, 10 from Canada, and 12 from Europe. Over 240 people are coming from outside the state of California. Those numbers are incredible even when you consider that not everyone on the signup list is sure to come.
It's difficult to come up with a system that's fair for everyone with those kinds of numbers. At least one thing is clear: the tournament must start and end at a reasonable hour. Otherwise people with flights back home, long drives, or even jobs on Monday would have to miss the back end of the tournament. Our two main jobs as tournament organizers are to make sure everyone has a good time and to make sure that the tournament is run fairly. IMHO, both of those goals are impossible to achieve if people are forced to play 20 hours a day for 3 or 4 days in a row.
For B5, the typical US tournament setup has absolutely no prayer of working. Let me walk you through the numbers to explain what I mean. For those of you who don't care to wade through a bunch of math (not very hard math, but math nonetheless), skip down a bit. Shoryuken.com and The Gameroom ran an MvC2 and CvS tournament in February. Both tournaments, coincidentally, had 52 people apiece. Both were run using the standard double elimination format on 2 cabinets. The MvC2 tournament took about 10 hours to finish. Here comes the math: on average how long does each game take? A double elimination tournament with 52 people takes 104 matches. Each match is the best 2 out of 3 games (not 100% true, but close enough for these purposes). Crunch the numbers and you come out with about 4.5 minutes per game (10 hours * 60 minutes / (104 matches * 2.5 games / 2 cabinets)). Since the 4.5 minute number was derived from an actual tournament, it includes time to fix broken joysticks, time to track down people for their matches, etc. The 4.5 number sounds about right when you consider that an MvC2 game itself takes around 3 minutes to end in a timeout victory and that there's bound to be at least 2 minutes to account for character selection, picking sides, finding the next opponet to play, and so on.
Now suppose the B5 MvC2 tournament draws 450 people. Keep in mind that our goal is to finish the tournament in no more than 18 hours (12 hours of play on Saturday and 6 hours of play on Sunday). We can't take any more time than that, as we have 3 other tournaments to complete as well (ST, A3, and CvS). Since we're estimating each game at 4.5 minutes, each match will take 11.25 minutes (4.5 minutes * average 2.5 games per match). It takes 900 matches for a 450 man double elimination tournament, so that's 10,125 game minutes, or 168.75 of game hours!! That's a lot of time! In order to finish that in just 18 hours, we'd need 10 MvC2 cabinets. And those cabinets would be busy ALL the time. CvS tends to run a bit longer than MvC2, so we'd need an additional 10 CvS cabinets running in parallel. Summing up, we'd need 20 cabinets, 10 MvC2 boards, and 10 CvS boards. I don't know of a single arcade in the country with those kinds of resources.
Therefore, a 450 man double elimination tournament will not work. It will not work. If you believe anything else, you're in complete denial. The format must change, or the tournament has no prayer of finishing by Sunday night. Our first attempt to fix the problem was to cap at 256. A 256 man double elimination tourney would take only 57% of the resources of a 450 man tournament, which means we could get by with 6 MvC2 and 6 CvS cabinets. That's still a tall order, but attainable. But as several of you pointed out, a 256 man cap is way too small.
If you look at the equations we've derived for computing the time it takes to run the tournament you'll see there are only 3 variables: the number of people competing, the number of machines used, and the number of games people play. We've shown that we can do a 256 man double elimination tourney, but a 256 man cap is unfair to too many people. Obtaining more cabinets takes money, and with no real sponsors as of yet that's hard to come by. Therefore we must reduce the number of games. There is no other way.
So how do we limit the number of games? Well, look at how many games each person plays during the course of the tournament. It takes 2 losses to eliminate someone, and each loss takes an average of 2.5 games. So each person plays a minimum 5 games. Reducing that number below 5 is the only alternative we have. There are two ways we can do it: remove the 2-out-of-3 rule and make it 1 game or go to single elimination. After long discussions among the tournament organizers and several tournament veterans, it's clear that going single elimination is the lesser of 2 evils. The 2-out-of-3 rule is there to mitigate the effect of counter-characters and to reduce the liklihood of fluke wins.
So here's the best we've worked out. We've raised the cap to 512 people. In all honesty, we don't believe we're going to hit that cap. Even if everyone who's signed up on the webpage goes, we would still be over 100 people below the 512 cap. Since we've doubled the cap, we need to half the number of games. So here's the rules.
All pool play will be done on Saturday. Pool play will take at most 448 matches, which takes 5040 game minutes, or 84 game hours, which means we'll need 7 MvC2 cabinets. In the event that we only have 5 MvC2 cabinets, it will take 16 hours to finish Pool Play (which means the tournament will end at 4:00 AM on Saturday). This is the worst case scenario. I doubt we'll get 512 people. If we get 400, Pool Play is scheduled to end at midnight, which is our goal. Sunday's finals will take 128 matches, which is 1440 minutes, or 24 game hours. To finish in 6 hours, we'll need 4 cabinets, which is fine.
This is the best workable solution we can come up with. We know the community frowns on single elimination, but frankly, the community needs to get over it. I predict that single elimination qualifers are a REQUIREMENT for this and any future tournaments that draw hundreds of players. The only other alternatives are to cap (undesirable) or to obtain more hardware (impossible). Tournaments in Japan are single elimination, 1-game, which I now believe is due to the fact that their tournaments are so much larger than ours. It's inevitable, so get used to it. If anyone has a solution that doesn't contradict the facts in this document, feel free to e-mail me.
Those of you who have been reading with a skeptical eye noticed that we need 7 MvC2 cabinets and 7 CvS cabinets to pull this off. Those of you who have been to the Gameroom know that they only have 4 cabinets. Those of you with a gradeschool education know that 14 minus 4 is 10. Getting those 10 extra cabinets is a tall order (not to mention the boards). To help make up the difference, there will be a cover charge for your first tournament entry fee. We estimate that this charge will be somewhere around $5. So if you play in every tournament, it will cost you $45 ($5 cover + $10 entry * 4). Furthermore, if anyone lives in the California bay or Sacramento area and has a cabinet they would like to lend us for the tournament, please contact me at ponder@shoryuken.com. We'll pick it up for you on Thursday, drop it back off on Monday, and give you all your tournament entries for free, plus a free T-shirt.
Well, there you have it. B5 is shaping up to be the largest SF tournament ever held on US soil by far. With progress comes change, and part of that change is saying goodbye to the double elimination format.